So I'm a senior
studying linguistics.
This is my last
quarter at Western.
And like Dr. Denham said,
this grew out of interest
in a new syntactic form,
and grammaticalization just
happened to coincide
with this research.
So there might be some
people in the audience that
are unfamiliar with
grammaticalization,
either as a research
framework or as a phenomenon--
but tendency to describe
grammaticalization
as moving from lexical to
more grammatical over time.
So these are for forms or other
types of grammatical functions.
And my investigation is
about specific phenomena.
And I'll look at various
levels of linguistic analysis--
so semantic, pragmatic,
morphosyntactic,
phonological changes--
and look at those
throughout time.
And so here is some
traditional examples
of how this word "because"
is used in English.
So this is from the 19th
century, Mark Twain.
Quote, "I know it because
she told me so herself."
So here, "because"
introducing a clause.
The second here, this is
from Bonfire of the Vanities,
more recent.
"He couldn't turn left
because of the wall."
So here, introducing a
prepositional phrase.
But recently, "because"
has been able to take
some new complements
introduced-- in
this case, noun phrases.
So a couple of these are from
the micro-blogging platform
Tumblr.
I'll just read the second one.
"I can't come out tonight
because homework."
And then interestingly,
the third one here
is from The Financial Post.
This is a Canadian
business website.
"Super Mario Run will require
an always-on internet connection
because reasons."
So that may sound new
or cheeky, or something.
But what's really
interesting is that is
the title of an article
that then goes on
to provide investment
strategies for blue-chip stocks
for Canadian citizens.
So quite a different
register from Tumblr.
And we'll see that
theme go on here.
So from The Atlantic,
"English has
a new preposition, because
internet," in this case,
reporting on this
phenomenon itself.
I'd like to skip the second
example and go to the third.
This is from Esquire.
"There are terrorist
attacks happening,
and the media not only
are not reporting them,
they don't want to report
them, because reasons."
So this may still
convey that same type
of shared meaning of
irony or reference,
but certainly in a
new way, and a topic
that's much more serious.
So I was really interested in
studying "because" because this
is a brand new
syntactic phenomenon,
and it has not gone unnoticed.
So Gretchen McCulloch has done
some kind of online sleuthing
and pinpointed the
genesis around 2008,
so making it less
than nine years old.
And in 2013, the
American Dialect Society
chose this as their
Word of the Year,
citing reasons like it exploding
with new possibilities--
and then, simply,
"Because helpful."
So the significance of
my study specifically
tries to put a quantitative
and qualitative analysis more
rigorously, in a
more formal way.
Currently, the
syntactic structure
has been commented on
to varying degrees.
But none of that mentions the
kind of cline of grammaticality
that has existed for this word.
And diachronic study in general
is simply not available.
So my central research
questions were, in
what ways has the word "because"
become grammaticalized,
particularly in the
past quarter century?
And then secondly, is
its newest distribution--
so, "because" plus
reasons, et cetera--
compatible with this cline.
And so to understand
this current trend,
we need to go back.
And I'm going to analyze some
corpora from the last 200 or so
years, and then also do
a qualitative analysis
of the genesis of the word
"because" in Middle English,
and then its trajectory across
all those linguistic analysis
analytical type of
subfields since then.
So on your handout, there's
some more specificity
around the types
of things that I
was looking for and across
all of the three corpora
I looked up.
Specifically, I was
looking for environments
that could potentially produce
this new type of structure.
And I also kept the glossing
that the Oxford English
Dictionary used
for the polysemes
that they had marked throughout
history, just for consistency.
I think we'll see that
there are some reasons
that that glossing may need to,
at the very least, be updated.
So first from the Corpus of
Historical American English,
which is a written-word
corpus from 1810 through 2010.
So usage is basically
split between preposition
and conjunction, predominantly.
And conjunction
has a higher edge.
But interestingly, "because
of"-- so any construction
with "because of" is the
single highest collocation,
at 40% of the collocations here.
I next looked at the Corpus
of Contemporary American
English, which at one
time, was the largest
database in English.
And this looks at spoken
and written word sources
in American English.
And in this year, 200 tokens
that I looked at from 1990
through 2015,
conjunctive use has
increased fairly dramatically.
And any other adverbial or other
types of usage has dropped out.
I next looked at
News on the Web,
which is a gigantic web-based
corpus, international corpus,
that goes from 2010
through yesterday.
And interestingly
here, conjunctive use
has almost completely
overtaken other arguments.
And we do actually see
emergence of the new form, which
was the kernel of my research.
And of 400 tokens,
there were two examples,
and these are the two examples.
"It's dumb because
Hillary Clinton,"
a noun phrase introduction.
And then an adverbial phrase--
"I won't go to see
it because PG-13."
And so now that
we've known what's
going on for the
last 200 years, I
want to present
some data that looks
at the whole cline from its
source in Middle English
through today.
So again, there's more
details on the handout,
but lexicalization
occurs basically
within the first 50
years of its emergence
as a compound preposition.
So the paraphrastic "by cause"
becomes, orthographically
at least, hyphenated and
then compounded, and then
completely changes
to monomorphemic.
And that happens by the
end of the 15th century.
It's pretty consistent
in the writing.
So this is a very normal
part of grammaticalization.
So something that had
lexical separable components,
free morphemes, like "by,"
which is a preposition,
and "cause," which is a noun--
those becoming inseparable.
And I think native
speakers not being
able to disambiguate
those morphemes, this
helped it to lose
its collocations,
although some persisted.
Syntactically-- so
in Middle English,
for those of you that are
comfortable with Middle
English, paraphrastic
constructions
could be used
adverbially in this case,
glossed as a
compound preposition
taking a noun complement.
Interestingly,
always needed "that"
or a "why," so some pro form.
And we see a quote here from
the 14th century, "By cause
that he was her neighbor."
For this reason, he
was her neighbor.
So doesn't quite have a
referential meaning quite yet.
After that, the
adverbial use could
be used more pragmatically.
And as soon as that
occurred, there
comes to be conjunctive
types of meanings.
And then in just the
last probably 20 years,
there's been evidence
that syntacticians
gloss this as a subordinating
preposition instead
of a conjunction.
Semantically-- so
we talked about it
being a sentential adverb
meaning "by way of."
So this is from
the 14th century.
Very soon, it's been extended
to refer to the antecedent's
reason, still collocated with
"why," as in this example,
"because why," from 1390.
So an elliptical use
occurs actually very early,
and this has spawned
a conjunctive meaning.
Most of the elliptical or
other adverbial polysemes
have fallen out completely
by the 17th century.
But the conjunctive
meaning has persisted--
so for the reason
of the antecedent.
The example here-- "Put him
away because he is dangerous."
And this now coexists--
and we saw earlier,
from the corpora data,
that this has come to
predominate the word usage.
The newest form-- so introducing
some other lexical item
or lexeme, is leached further.
So it's getting its
semantic and most
of the morphophonological
weight from the argument.
"Of" has been all but omitted.
And we'll see on another slide
that the syntactic distribution
has been further reduced.
So what is happening
with the current form?
We've looked at some past
forms and corpora data.
"Because" exists in a paradigm
with other subordinating
prepositions like
"although," "until,"
"since," as some examples.
But the new form is more
fixed syntactically.
We would expect in that
paradigm for those items
to be able to move with
their constituents.
But this newest usage,
in fact, cannot.
So again, from
Gretchen McCulloch,
"I hate you because
reasons," this is acceptable.
"Because reasons, I hate
you," this is not acceptable.
So in general, my hypothesis is
this new syntactic arrangement
is coming about because
of semantic blocking.
And this is based on
pragmatic conditions.
Of course, this is more
recently highly referential.
And the semantic field
is based on the context
of the discourse.
But it does rely a lot on the
recent ironic or other use.
So this kind of
marked syntactic form.
And the syntagms that
are being selected,
just in the 11th hour,
I've found other lexemes--
in this case, an
interjection that's used.
So noun phrase,
adverbial phrase,
interjection, much different
from clausal or preposition
types of selections
that persisted
for hundreds of years.
So some things that
I did not look at--
sociolinguistic
factors or dissecting
the community of users.
I also did not search
for either tokens
of or instances qualitatively
of reduced or otherwise modified
phonological forms,
like "cause" and "cuz."
And I will open it
up to any questions.
[APPLAUSE]
Questions?
I have one.
Maybe this is just a comment.
I'm not sure yet.
And I asked you a version of
this at the other presentation.
I keep thinking about the
connection to "since."
Yes.
But I think-- so the
fact that "since,"
which has a similar
semantic meaning, I mean,
a similar meaning to
"because," can take a clause,
or it can take a noun phrase--
like "since 10 o'clock"
or "since I last saw you."
So it can take the same things.
But I think that those are
different meanings for "since."
So there's the "since" as in
time, that has to do with time
and can only be used with
time expressions, I think.
"Since last year,"
"since time immemorial."
And then that one can't
take "Since reasons," right?
I mean, the other one
that introduces a clause
can't take a noun phrase
that's not a time one,
"Since reasons."
So I mean, I think
before, I was thinking,
oh, but what about "since"?
It's just like-- it already
takes a noun phrase.
But I don't think
the same "since"
that means the same
thing as "because"
can take a noun phrase
with that meaning.
I don't think there
was a question there.
Yeah.
Well, I have a comment
back, at least,
which is that in the
course of my study,
I did look at a couple,
including "since,"
in that subordinating
preposition paradigm.
And there has been a lot
of work on the difference
between "since" and "for" and
"vor" and "seit" in German
and their linked polysemes
and the types of arguments
that they can take.
So I would just put that
out there to that research.
Yeah.
Yeah, the most interesting
of the examples
is the phrase, "because
reasons," it seems to me.
Yeah
Because otherwise,
it's simply just making
a compound preposition
into a simple preposition
by contracting it, have
a certain stylistic feel,
certain groups doing it.
"Because reasons," I'm
trying to figure out--
does that mean that
"I have my reasons
but I don't really feel
like I want to tell you"?
It's a little bit of a stylistic
marking or a flippancy, almost.
Yes.
Like you can just say, "Well,
because," and not explain why.
Because you don't
need to explain.
"Because" already means
that there's a reason.
That seemed to be
interesting, because it
might be becoming a
phrase in addition
to this change in
the syntax and stuff.
That might be turning
into a marked phrase,
expressing a certain emotion.
Yeah.
So when I looked at
the historical clines,
the rise did come from
this reduced form.
So certainly it could have
come from the clausal form,
this polyseme giving rise to
this, instead of the other way
around, or potentially
a common-- you know,
using the one form a
different, new way.
So it would be
interesting to, I think,
have more data of
"because reasons"
and those types of argument to
understand its trajectory more.
Because it does
seem to be born out
of a contracted form of
that very particular phrase.
Dr. Curtis?
Another piece that
kind of bothered--
or I'd like to see
more examples of it--
"because of" some
other end piece.
Because it does
sound very atypical.
"Because reasons"
in square brackets,
meaning insert reasons here.
Like "because Hillary
Clinton" or "because science,"
those seem less
elliptical or even--
and others.
But I also was thinking about--
I'm wondering about
the preference to--
for prepositions, and
maybe syntactically,
if there's something
bigger in this preference
for prepositions over
subordinating conjunctions.
I'm thinking of "different
from" and "different than,"
but maybe that's the opposite.
Even though we do
say "different than,"
there's a preference to
say "different than me"
and "different from me," as
opposed to "different than I
am" or "different"--
and playing with that
difference as well,
and wondering if it is
any way syntactically
similar to "because,"
and you'd rather not
say the whole
sentence, but rather--
Mm-hm.
Well, I-- I don't know
exactly that answer.
But I will say, in the
course of my research, again,
there does seem to be
a trend, specifically
from the late '90s, to
be using this category,
subordinating preposition,
preferentially
over something like conjunction,
which I think is more typical.
But so I don't know exactly
where it's situated in that--
and from frequency or other
types of perspectives.
Yeah.
Because we like to
say prepositions
are a closed class.
But it seems like we just
created a preposition here,
and also with "than,"
in a sense meaning.
Yeah.
And that would not-- so there's
some details on the handout
about unidirectionality.
But this type of movement,
potentially from a conjunction
to preposition, is not--
would be highly
atypical and does not
seem to be supported by
the historical record.
In fact, these polysemes
developed differently
and have persisted, one
as a preposition, one
as a conjunction.
So I don't think I
answered your question,
but I hope I commented somewhat.
It's OK.
Dr. Xing?
I think the alternative way
to explain that situation
is to differentiate
it from preposition--
it could be considered as a
discourse particle instead
of a preposition, especially in
that case, in "because reason."
And it's very different from,
say, "because of Hillary."
You know, that's a
clear preposition use.
Where "because reasons,"
definitely has more discourse
content in there.
Another thing I
was thinking about,
the difference between
"since" and "because" is I
think "since" is
related to the temporal.
That is generally
the early stage
of the pattern in the
grammaticalization cline.
And it's a-- they always
start with temporal and move
to spatial.
And for that kind of a
quality or conditional,
these kind of discourse
conjunction function
normally comes in late.
So I would consider
"because" is a kind
of leaning towards the other
end of the grammaticalization
cline, whereas things
are still kind of early.
Because temporal is very--
still kind of concrete, where
if you think that because it
refers to many reasons or
circumstance that is more,
I think, kind of more
qualitative type of concept.
Do you guys-- this one?
Yeah.
Just a quick relation
to another term.
"Because reasons" is also--
I think it might be
kind of similar to,
like, "for science."
Or, "Hey, do you know that
cute girl over there's name?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Oh, for science."
So it's kind of
similar, in that.
Yeah.
Ironic tone, sure.
Jordan?
Do you have time for one more?
Yeah.
No, actually, it's just
a question for you.
OK.
I'll ask you.
OK.
All right.
We better stay a
little bit on track.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
