Because (Prep).

I wonder if the loss of “of” after “because” is part of a wider phenomenon of omitting prepositions in English. For instance, I learned “out of the window” but most people around me now say “out the window”. People used to agree or disagree “on” things, but now some of them “agree things”. Similarly, some of them “travel Europe” (a less recent usage, I think) after they “graduate high school or college”.

I don’t keep up all that closely with the Young People and How They Talk On The Internet, but I have certainly seen it used more broadly than Jim thinks he has, although broadly consistently with Pullum’s “vague and non-serious” description. Although maybe “non-serious” just means “informal” or perhaps “playful” (one can be “playful” while still being “serious” for some but not all meaning of “serious,” or so I would contend). One might, for example, assert that such and such crackpot position affirmed by someone or other on the internet is wrong “because science” as a way of conveying something like “is so obviously wrong for reasons sufficiently obvious to anyone versed in science that I’m not going to waste my time and insult my interlocutors’ intelligence by spelling them out in detail.”

I don’t mean that it has become standard or is even on its way to becoming so, just that it would not be surprising if it did.

For me as for Jim, the canonical use is a sardonic summing up: “Of course they oppose it, because socialism.” But Mark Liberman’s post has lots of examples of less pointed (less successful?) uses as well. And note, Geoff Pullum isn’t arguing that this usage makes “because” a preposition; he’s arguing that it should always have been classified that way, and that this is one tiny addition to the prepositional functions it already performs.

I don’t see the WOTY hoople as “marketing nonsense”; I think it’s a fun and interesting excuse to track (and discuss) lexical trends and innovations, however ephemeral they turn out to be. This is especially the case with the ADS event on account of its numerous specialist categories. Looking back on previous winners also provides a snapshot of erstwhile social/cultural preoccupations and fads.

Some years the winners are pretty uninspiring: a financial topic that dominated the headlines, for example. So “because” is an interest choice for several reasons, not least them the disagreements over its grammar. I’m also pleased because it’s a usage I’ve written about and have been following (and I picked it as my word/phrase of the year at Macmillan Dictionary Blog before Christmas).

One of Pullum’s irritating mannerisms is that he makes technical points for shock value. CGEL says (I think rightly) that there is no hard and fast line between the gerund (nounish) and participle (adjectivish) uses of the English -ing form. But instead of adopting a neutral term like “-ing form”, it saddles us with the hybrid “gerund-participle”. Okay. But when it merges the traditional categories of preposition, adverbial particle, and subordinating conjunction (again, I think, on good grounds), it insists on using preposition for all of them, and then jumping down people’s throats when they use the older terminology in all innocence, thus conflating the terminology issue (which is trivial) with the substantive issue.

The same thing happens with CGEL’s restriction of subjunctive to the old present subjunctive; instead of saying that the old preterite subjunctive is “not a subjunctive at all”, it’s better to explain the point: that the present and the preterite have gone their separate ways enough to justify using separate top-level terms subjunctive and conditional for them.

Stan: Do you actually say “hoople” rather than “hoopla”, or was that a typo?

John: It was a typo, alas, one of several in that comment. Too much screen time today, and not enough care before clicking. But being called a tool of Big Lexicography by Mr Hat has soothed me considerably!

Stan the Man: just another running dog of Big Lexicography.

My principal reaction to everything of the WOTY kind is a curmudgeonly annoyance that seems very similar to Hat’s. Nevertheless I was happy to hear that “because [NP]” won.

I note also that I don’t care if this particular “word of the year” is a word or not. I’m glad it was chosen because I like it.

I think Pullum missed the mark on this one. Pullum says that the “new because” is the same as the “old because”, with just a slight expansion of the leeway it can have in the type of its complement. He argues that the “old because” could take of-PP complements (“because of it”) and clause complements (“because it’s there”), but couldn’t have null complements or NP complements. The “new because”, he says, merely additionally allows NP complements (“because syntax”), just as some other prepositions do, like in (“in the house”) or since (“since Tuesday”).
To me, the “new because” is often willfully ungrammatical, in a way that purposefully jars. Consider the following examples (all from the web):

—Idiot thinks sports cars are now irrelevant because stupid. An adjective complement. Are there any other prepositions at all with an Adj complement?

—Michigan Rejects “War Sux” Vanity Plate Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. An imperative clause complement. Bad, bad, bad.

I also found They left me as friend because think I’m not interested in them.. how can I fix? but that seems like mere telegraphic/texting style, not the onward march of the brave new syntax.

—Because, after all, why not? is a bit odd. I think of it as “old because”, but can’t exactly say why.

If anything, the closest parallel to the “new because” is the good old null-complement form, just because. Like the “new because”, it flaunts its non-sequitur complement to highlight an unreasonable excuse—in fact, a nonexistent one.

I agree with John Cowan. Dr. Pullum’s remarks are absurd, because they presuppose that terms have meanings he would consider more logical, rather than the meanings they actually have. He’s like the peever who claims to misunderstand “I didn’t see nobody” — except he’s worse, because he should know better.

ML: Was there a meaning attached to because les mouches, using it for example as an absurdist excuse: “We missed meeting those people because les mouches or was it just a nonsense expression ?

Stan: I looked up the reference at All things linguistic and found some of the interpretations (and some of the examples) very strange. The author says that the word after because in because Noun or because Verb is an interjection. Also, there is a quotation from a current dictionary which refers to the category of “subordinating conjunctions”, including which and who among those conjunctions. It seems that “subordinate” now means “dependent”, without a distinction between subordinate and relative clauses, or between the type of words which introduce them.

I am probably way behind the times in theoretical syntactic knowledge, but is this the new grammar?

m.-l., here are more French becauses, at Bob, dictionnaire d’argot, an interesting resource of I have never heard of before.

Coming from a Russian perspective, where incomplete sentences are norm, pronoun as subject is often dropped and is/are in the present tense is not used, I thought because + noun, verb or adjective was simply English adopting the use of incomplete forms as acceptable.
I don’t like fast cars because stupid – [they are] dropped.
It reached a dead-end because socialism [as a system doesn’t work]
Michigan Rejects “War Sux” Vanity Plate Because [we should] THINK OF THE CHILDREN

If you look at it that way, because is still a conjunction. It’s the sentence structure that has evolved not the word. No?

Mmm, I don’t think so. “Because NOUN” can almost always be rephrased as “because of NP”. If the title had been “English Has a New Preposition, Because of the Internet”, it would be just as semantically ambiguous.

Idiot thinks sports cars are now irrelevant because stupid.

This can also be read as traditional because with an elliptical complement clause: ‘because they are stupid’, rather than ‘because he is stupid’.

@m-l

Is not the French use of ‘because’ comparable to the British usage of ‘sans’.

It was a common conceit at college to use ‘sans’ instead of ‘without’ (though always pronounced in an English fashion, not as in French), e.g. “I’ll have a whisky, neat, sans ice”.

I’ve noticed that since about the 1990s this has spread from Oxbridge to become much more widespread.

Alex: Sans has been an English word since the 14th century: the OED gives us Saunz doute swa dide þai alle bydene ‘without a doubt they all remained’. The best-known use is probably Shakespeare’s Second childishnesse, and meere obliuion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans euery thing, and many modern uses echo it, like this from 1977: “It offers anxiety enough for the Rhodesians themselves, […] to face the prospect of starting life afresh in some harsher, colder country, sans servants, sans swimming pool, sans sunshine, sans supremacy.”

H, John Cowan: Right now, my best description of the “new because” is that it takes as its complement a stock phrase, to be understood as evincing an emotional response, which allows a leap of logic, either justified (“…because stupid”) or not (“…because think of the children”).

Interestingly, the “new because” does not appear comfortable with pronominal complements (*”…because you”), whereas the “old because” does (“…because of you”).

I think there’s another, less noted way in which the domain of because has expanded: I’ve noticed in my own speech that it can be used not only to answer questions of why, but also to answer questions of how for which the more prescriptively correct response would be something like in that. For example, if someone asks me “How is that good/interesting?”, I’ll reply, “It’s good/interesting because…”. In cases like this, in that just seems too stilted for conversational use.

Yeah, I guess it might not be anything new. On an intellectual level I associate because with why (“for what reason?” “for this reason”), so I notice a certain… disjunction when I use it in answer to a how question, even though this usage does come to me naturally. If anything, this may actually demonstrate that how includes a “for what reason” sense in addition to its more commonly recognized “in what way” domain: dictionary.com lists this as one of the word’s senses, giving the example “How can you talk such nonsense?”