Katherine Rosman reports for the NY Times (archived) on a new movie of Hattic interest:
Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend. “I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor who was wearing a shirt that read “I’M SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” — notably, the message on the shirt lacked punctuation.
The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”
They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.
The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life. […]
A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022. […]
The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice. “Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row. “You may,” one of them answered.
Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low. […]
The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition. To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”
The last bit gives me hope that Ms. Jovin is not just another peddler of prescriptivist myths, despite some of the assholes she attracts (“You may”). She turned up here back in 2018 as the “den mother” of the polyglot community. And I enjoyed the reporter’s bio tagline: “While reporting this story, Katherine Rosman learned the difference between affect and effect. She thinks.” (Thanks, Eric!)
Can’t find any extracts from the book, unfortunately, but this snippet from a review in Publishers Weekly seems reassuring:
Found a positive comment from John McWhorter, too, which probably bodes well (ambivalent though I am about McW in some respects.)
That sounds excellent!
The quizzes on her Syntaxis site show she knows what she’s talking about (though the site is not really aimed at the ever-prestigious Hatter demographic.)
And one can only approve of
https://archive.ellenjovin.com/about.html
One of Us!
That’s not why, though. I haven’t encountered the phenomenon outside of English and one Canadian variety of French. (…Anyone know about Dutch?)
And if Shut up! is supposed to be an example…
“Shut up!” wasn’t supposed to be an example, I’m sure. In this case it means “That’s news to me! Awesome!”
Exactly.
responds with a delighted “Shut up!”
In Heartstopper, Charlie uses “Shut up!” that way often. It’s a thing with him.
The dialog and the plot of the series are full of side-glances to comics. I missed these the first time around, I mean, how can I be expected to be familiar with MCU ? And how campy it all is ?
Now I know that Nick and Charlie are modelled on the Young Avengers Hulkling and Wiccan, aka Teddy Altman and William Kaplan. They have a Jewish wedding. And a penthouse looking over Central Park.
@David Marjanović: Where do you think separable prefixes in German come from?
Also, Norse.
“Shut up!” wasn’t supposed to be an example, I’m sure. In this case it means “That’s news to me! Awesome!”
More fully, “That’s too good to be true, so stop lying!” I think.
More fully, “That’s too good to be true, so stop lying!” I think.
That’s not at all what it means on the many occasions when Charlie says it. Twice, for example, in the exchange with his sister starting at 11:31 in s1e6. That’s one Beleg, there are many others in the series. Just listen and then try to explain it. That’s more convincing then the other way round. .
With Charlie it’s an exclamation of slightly embarrassed pleasure and admission. “Lying” doesn’t come into it.
“Shut up!”, with a rising intonation, optionally separately on both words = “You’re kidding!”, “No way!”, “Get out of here!”
Right. That particular intonation is not required, though. Listen to s1e6. That’s much easier than consulting a dusty old dictionary. Less room for unbridled speculation on first principles, though, which may cause some heartburn.
“Get out (of here)!” is an alternative. Elaine on “Seinfeld” used both.
‘More fully, “That’s too good to be true, so stop lying!” I think.’
That’s not at all what it means on the many occasions when Charlie says it.
Sorry, I wasn’t talking about Heartstopper. I was replying to ktschwarz, who was talking about the “Shut up!” in the OP. I don’t usually watch TV series, so I’ll take your word about Charlie.
I haven’t encountered the phenomenon outside of English and one Canadian variety of French. (…Anyone know about Dutch?)
Swedish. Very similar to English. “That’s the woman I spoke to”=“ det är kvinnan jag pratade med”. I assume Danish and Norwegian work the same way.
Contrast German “Das ist die Frau, mit der ich gesprochen habe”. German is the most conservative and hidebound Germanic language I suppose.
Standard Dutch is more like German – “dat is de vrouw met wie ik sprak”.
Don’t know about Friesian.
“gives me hope that Ms. Jovin is not just another peddler of prescriptivist myths”
Based on what I’ve found from her posts on social media the last few years, she absolutely isn’t. The following excerpt from the transcript of one of her appearances on the Because Language podcast seems apropos:
I think ‘you may’ is a kind of joke for a lot of people – they thought it was silly at the time, so they’re being silly if they say it now. (I occasionally start an answer to a friend ‘well, you MAY, but…’ if there’s no objection in theory but a practical reason why they possibly can’t!)
Weirdly, they may not read grammar books for fun.
I am not alone !! This is so empowering !!!
But but but what do they do for fun then? The mind boggles
I gather that they watch cricket. It is not for us to judge.
Based on what I’ve found from her posts on social media the last few years, she absolutely isn’t.
Thanks, that’s good to know, and I hope the movie does well.
Just read the novella ‘The River Has Roots’ by Amal El-Mohtar, where ‘grammar’ is a kind of magic, and a ‘grammarian’ is a kind of magician. Interesting fantasy, worth reading.
Well, “grimoire” is an etymological doublet of “grammar” …
(As, of course, is “glamour”, as all Hatters – and Ellen Jovin – know intuitively anyway.)
Sounds worth a look. I’ve liked what I’ve read of her work.
Amal El-Mohtar … her work
Does “Amal” swing both ways ? I’m thinking of Amahl and the Night Visitors.
I’m looking for a way to address and refer to programmers at work (among more than a thousand of them) whose names in emails I can’t gender-parse. The German equivalent of “they/them” is not a thing here – yet. “Herr/Frau” is one problem. Duzen doesn’t solve it, but rather creates other problems.
Darcy says in Heartstopper: “I hate gender”. Do I ? No. Yet for lack of a galactic brain for foreign names, I can’t mark politeness without a risk of stepping on eggs. And there are so many pronoun fads for the hypersensitive. I’ll just ignore that one for now.
It seems easiest to do my best and then recoup when I’ve guessed wrong. Actually, that would add an all-too-human note to my personality. Maybe I should wear eye shadow too, that might help.
@Stu Clayton
thebump.com says gender-neutral.
@Stu:
The name does, though all the ones I know are in fact women. (It means “hope” in Arabic.) As for Ms El-Mohtar herself, WP says Yes.
all the ones I know are in fact women.
Same here, and Amahl and the Night Visitors is irrelevant, since Menotti presumably made up the name himself as “Arabic-sounding.” The actual name Amal (أمل) has short vowels and thus the stress is on the first syllable; nobody would ever render it “Amahl.”
Not everyone is born with a knowledge of Arabic vowel length. It must make life so much easier.
Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh .. and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all.
I acquired my knowledge of Arabic vowel length by years of bitter struggle. Much have I sacrificed to that end! What hours of watching cricket have I foregone! Many a time in the dark depths of night was I tempted to relinquish the fight; yet was I prevented from that fateful step by the hope (albeit, at times, all too faint) that some day, it would enable me to triumph in a comment on LanguageHat.
No luck so far, though.
Stu Clayton said:
Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh .. and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all.
Shout-out to another Stereolab fan.
Stereolab – Super Electric
I thought we’d discussed gramarye before, but google says no. I must be remembering when we discussed metheglyn.
From the sheer mercilessness of “verb-second” word order. What has to go in the second slot in “main clauses” is specifically the finite part of the verb. Any other verbal material – whole participles or infinitives as well as separable prefixes – has to go elsewhere, almost always at the end, though it can be put in the first slot for extremes of contrastive stress.
(If the verb itself is the extremely stressed topic of a topic-verb-comment sentence, it goes in the first slot in the infinitive, while its inflection stays behind in the second slot and must be borne by an auxiliary verb.)
The “verb-last” order of “subordinate clauses” is equally merciless: the finite part of the verb goes in the last slot, any other verbal material in the second-to-last, so the separable prefixes are actual prefixes in that case.
@dm
What is your opinion about non-standard constructions which force a non-separable-prefix preposition to the end, e.g. 《Da kann ich nichts für.》? Dutch is more productive of these constructions, e.g., “ik weet er niets van”, where I am not sure anyone (Hans?) says *ich weiß da nichts von.
I rather like (on aesthetic grounds) what seems to be the accepted wisdom among Chomskyites that German is simply SOV (Dutch too) and the verb-second thing is a superimposed marker of clause non-dependency. I’ve seen papers by sect members that simply call German “SOV” in passing without further comment – you’re evidently just expected to know.
(Kusaal, at any rate, really does specifically mark clauses as not-dependent, but with a tone overlay on the verb rather than by word order. Mooré does it with post-verbal enclitic particles instead.)
I look forward to Insubordination resulting in all German clauses eventually becoming SOV.
https://www.academia.edu/24481368/Insubordination_and_its_uses
I am not sure anyone (Hans?) says *ich weiß da nichts von
Sure, anybody who’s not somebody could say that. Or, heard often in these parts, “Da weiß ich nichts von“. Nothing unusual about any of these.
“Davon weiß ich nichts” and “ich weiß nichts davon” are less folksy. The less folksy versions of your first example are “Dafür kann ich nichts” and “Ich kann nichts dafür”
non-standard constructions which force a non-separable-prefix preposition to the end
No force involved, this is not Star Wars. The non-standardness just is the different in division and placement.
Stress and intonation vary in these variants. In “Da weiß ich nichts von“, the “da” is not particularly stressed. In “Davon weiß ich nichts” it is.
Da weiß ich nichts von.
DAvon weiß ich nichts.
But
Er ist daVON gelaufen.
ich weiß da nichts von.
Totally normal in colloquial German, but deprecated in the written standard, so you’d have to search for it in written sources that are closer to spoken German, like internet comments and text messages.
(Ninja’d by Stu)
Separation of prefixes: as Greek tmesis and the insertion of reflexive pronouns in Baltic show, separation is original PIE and the univerbation and reduction of separation is a later stage that happened at different times and to different degrees in the individual branches. The movement to the clause(-core) final position is then a specific development in German due to the factors mentioned by DM.
Short for Da kann ich nichts dafür (which is the version actually used Up South); arguably a separable verb prefix that contains a pronoun (“there”), clearly not a preposition.
I’ve seen such papers too. But the few that try to offer an argument always trot out the pure OV sentences:
Q: Was machen wir jetzt?
A: Bier trinken.
…and then they imply that these are the most basic sentences possible, so they reveal the most basic word order.
But the verb in these is never finite. To me it’s obvious they’re the second half of an SVOV sentence:
Wir tun jetzt Bier trinken.
Wir werden jetzt Bier trinken.
Alles, was wir jetzt noch machen können, ist(,) Bier (zu) trinken.
Dann müssen wir jetzt Bier trinken.
Disclaimer: I don’t drink beer. It’s disgusting. It’s just the example I once found somewhere, and as mentioned I’m not good at coming up with my own. … Actually, here’s one I just came up with:
Nicht rauchen!
Hier darf man nicht rauchen.
Ihr sollt hier nicht rauchen.
In short, once you reveal the subject, you are forced to also reveal the finite verb – in its only possible position, the second.
Further: wh- questions have verb-second order if you accept the position of the wh- words as the first slot, and yes/no questions, along with jokes*, have verb-second order if you accept that the first slot is empty. Further still, the first slot can be empty in other verb-second clauses**; this means that, specifically, a demonstrative pronoun has been omitted. With verb-last clauses you can’t do that.
Also… the word order doesn’t mark dependency unless you define these things circularly. Consider:
weil das so ist
denn es ist so
These mean exactly the same. Best I can tell, what goes on in my head is that most but not all conjunctions trigger verb-last order, and everything else doesn’t, regardless of actual meaning. You could call weil a “subordinating conjunction” and denn a “coordinating” one, and claim that “subordinating conjunctions” trigger verb-last order – but that’s just circular again.
This goes so far that dialects like mine have lost denn and use weil with both word orders. No other conjunction does this, and there’s no sign of either order winning.
* Treffen sich zwei. Kommt einer nicht.
** Geht nicht. “Doesn’t work.” – but only “that doesn’t work”, not “it doesn’t work”. Weiß ich nicht. – even here it’s easier to omit the object than the subject as long as the object is a demonstrative pronoun.
Actually, if you don’t go for the version with zu, I’d say what you’re doing is noun incorporation: […] ist biertrinken. But nobody spells it that way, unlike staubsaugen “vacuum” or, especially before the reform that went backwards in this case, autofahren “go by car”.
Mark Twain’s famous/notorious “The Awful German Language” goes on at some length about the tendency of high-falutin’ written German to be verb-final in the way that matters – not necessarily a theoretical finite verb but the participle or whatnot that actually gives substantive meaning to the sentence. “You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.”
In context that’s clearly about the finite verb at the end of “dependent” clauses. These do tend to get longer as you get more highfalutin’, but they’re not more common than in spoken language – maybe actually less, because some of them get replaced by participial constructions.
The Chomskyan notion involved with German word-order is more that the subordinate-clause verb-final order is in some sense fundamental, and that the main-clause order (including in questions) is the marked one.
I hold no brief for that kind of thing in German, but there really are languages in which the marking works that way round, rather than the subordinate-clause type having the specialised marked form. Kusaal is actually one of them: a discovery which greatly surprised me when I was first investigating verb tone, as I was then quite unaware of all this theoretical flimflam and had no way of fitting the facts into my preconceptions of how things should be expected to work.
I suspect that similar things may also be true of some of the related Oti-Volta languages in which it has been claimed that verbs don’t have lexical tone: few of the grammars go into much detail on what happens to verb tone in subordinate clauses, and just imply that it’s no different from main clauses by not mentioning it at all. One very elaborate tonal study of Konni says somewhat vaguely that the tone of verbs in subordinate clauses seems to depend on a number of factors yet to be determined.
Vedic Sanskrit is actually similar to Kusaal in this … no doubt this is all an inevitable consequence of Merge, and is genetically determined in the Language Organ.
… is in some sense fundamental …
Putting on my Philosopher of Science hat, I think Chomskyans will have a hard time justifying that ‘fundamental’. All I’ve ever seen is a justification on grounds of economy of description: since we’re going to Transformate/rearrange the Generated initial/abstract/so-called ‘underlying’ sequence, it’s more economical if the initial sequence carries all the markers the abstraction needs.
(Compare the claim that the ‘underlying’ form of adjectives in French is feminine, because they carry the explicit final consonant that gets ‘erased’ when attached to masc. nouns.)
What sense of ‘is’ is this? What sense of ‘fundamental’? Are we going to prise open speakers’ brains and find SOV in the machinery? It’s a descriptor’s theoretical construct only.
You could call weil a “subordinating conjunction” and denn a “coordinating” one, and claim that “subordinating conjunctions” trigger verb-last order
That’s what we were taught in school. Of course, school grammar doesn’t accept SVO sentences with weil. This even goes down to orthography – at least the way I was taught, you can write a clause starting with denn (and other coordinating conjunctions) as a full sentence, ending in a full stop, while doing that with a sentence starting with weil (or other subordinating conjunctions) would get you marked down.
@Pancho: Shout-out to another Stereolab fan.
It’s the first time I’d heard of the group. I like that drone a lot. I now associate it with the quote, which is actually from Watt.
I’d rather be a Stereolab fan than a Lady Windermere’s groupie.
it’s more economical if the initial sequence carries all the markers the abstraction needs
That’s the idea. From my point of view, that’s absolutely fine, because I don’t believe that any of these rules are real entities anyway. Nominalism rules OK!
I’ve worked out two distinct descriptions of the Kusaal tone system, one with two basic tones (which was my original formulation) and one with three. Both descriptions predict exactly the same surface tones; I now prefer the three-tone system entirely because it’s simpler.
So as far as “fundamentals” go, I think the question “how many basic underlying tones does Kusaal have?” doesn’t really mean anything much at all.
Unfortunately, many strains of Chomskyanism seem to believe that their imaginary constructions are too real, or even physically present in yer actual brain.
In reality the underlying structure of German is obviously VSO. „Reden können wir nachher“; „Tatsächlich haben die Schüler keine Wahl“; „Seit Jahren trägt er die selben Klamotten“; usw.
@Vanya, @DM, @PP – More about Dutch.
In the example, “met wie” can be replaced by the relative pronominal adverb “waarmee” (lit. with which) (commonly heard, although this is considered substandard by some, when referencing people). Note the preposition “met” taking its adverb form “mee”.
– Dat is de vrouw waarmee ik heb gesproken. (That’s the woman I spoke to.)
– Dat is de vrouw waarmee ik gesproken heb. (id.)
This “waarmee” can be split, “mee” moving to the end, but as this is a subordinate clause (“verb final” rule), it will appear just before the verb, not at the very end of the sentence.
– Dat is de vrouw waar ik mee heb gesproken.
– Dat is de vrouw waar ik mee gesproken heb.
An example of a main clause with split pronominal adverb “erin” (lit. in it):
– Hij trapte er niet in. (He didn’t fall for it.)
In this case this is just about the only possible word order, compare
– * Hij trapte erin niet. (impossible, ungrammatical)
– ? Hij trapte niet erin. (dubious, definitely unidiomatic)
An example of a question with split pronominal adverb “waarvoor” (lit. for what):
– Waar gebruikt u dit voor? (What do you use this for?)
Denn at the beginning of a sentence!?! No wonder civilization has ended! *throwing up hands along with radioactive fallout next to the plastic-waste campfire*
Topic-verb-comment sentence with the finite verb, können, in the 2nd position.
Comment-verb-topic sentence (comment fronted for emphasis) with the finite verb, haben, in the 2nd position.
Likewise with the finite verb, trägt, in the 2nd position.
It really is merciless.
It must have ended 200 years ago, with Goethe, Faust I, Vorspiel auf dem Theater:
This causal denn is a coordinating conjunction, and the preceding sentence may end with a comma, a semicolon or a full stop, depending on the writer, the printer’s house style or the modern editor.
I have taken a look at the distribution of this denn and weil in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and in general they are not easily interchangeable. Usually the narrative is stylistically ruined. There is a preponderance of weil in the preface, while the usually paratactic narrative of the stories demands denn for many (not all) causal connections; where weil is used, it cannot be easily replaced by denn, and the result sounds ugly.
And to return to Faust: Faust’s famous monologue starting the Osterspaziergang (largely paratactic) has causal denn, whereas the pedantic Wagner’s reply has weil (I can almost imagine him mentally translating from a pseudo-Ciceronian Latin period).
Good points.
(And I’m not surprised Goethe did yet another thing that is beyond the shallower prescriptivists.)
Oh, I forgot the extra complication: into the 60s or 70s or so, schools taught that if you put a weil clause at the beginning of a sentence, you have to replace weil by da. This word is an exact synonym that does not change the syntax and remains reasonably common in writing (regardless of where the clause goes), but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it in unprepared speech.
@dm
Here is one from the Archiv der Gegenwart (2001):
“GYSI schloss, dass die letzten elf Jahre für ihn eine schwere Zeit gewesen seien und er eine Menge durchgemacht habe, da er sehr oft angefeindet worden sei. ”
This is reported speech, so maybe that is special, although it reads more informally (except for angefeindet, where I could imagine a less polite word in spontaneous speech 😊) to me.
My Eselsbrücke was:
Weil = because (Ursache)
Da = since (Begründung)
Denn = for (Behauptung/Erweiterung vom Kontext)
But this distinction (including for English) may only exist inside my own head.
@PlasticPaddy: I can’t see denn as meaning for. Even if we set aside that for is subordinating, the register feels all wrong.
It is limited to your head, I’m afraid. Da is unremarkable in the registers that use sei; that’s all there is to it.
@dm
I was afraid of that…
@Brett
I should have said [BECAUSE], [SINCE] and [FOR]– as you say there is no 3-way distinction in modern English, and maybe there is no distinction between usage of since and because.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it in unprepared speech.
@DM: Only because we never talked; I’m a frequent user of da as a causal conjunction, also in speech. That’s just a personal quirk of mine (and I was already known back in school as someone who “talks like a book”.)
I went to school in the 1960s and 70s, and nobody taught this silly rule.
And here an example from an early sketch by Kafka:
You cannot really replace either instance of denn with weil. Note that the first denn introduces a short inserted sentence, while the second one introduces a paragraph-long complicated sentence: that would have been impossible with subordinating weil.
German without causal denn and da would be much less elegant.
Even if we set aside that for is subordinating
? You can’t begin a sentence with a for-clause.
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed:
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52329/jubilate-agno-56d230b3cd23f
Admittedly, the poet was (probably) confined in an asylum at the time he composed this.
It seems clear Rodger C was never at a birthday celebration, where “For he/she’s a jolly goodfellow” was inflicted on the birthday boy/girl.
@David E.: In the Shakespeare and Smart examples, I’d say the “for” clauses are subordinate to the preceding main clauses, though they’re not punctuated that way. I imagine the same is true of the whole “my cat Jeoffrey” section of Jubilate Agno, the only one I’d seen before, but I’m not going to check. The same is certainly true of the long “For” clauses, punctuated as sentences, in The Lord of the Rings.
@Rodger C.: But what’s going on there? I wonder whether that song always followed a toast, so the syntax was, “I give you X’s very good health—for he’s a jolly good fellow.”
I see what you mean, but I think your argument would also mean that “and” and “but” could never begin a sentence. Many sentences could not be spoken out of the blue to initiate a conversation, but need to be set up by preceding context; that doesn’t mean they aren’t sentences.
There is no reason prosodically to deny that “for” is beginning a sentence in cases like these. (For considerations of prosody are certainly relevant here.)
I have a (Welsh-speaking) colleague who has a notable tic of starting sentences with “for” where I would say “because.” I suppose the fact that I’ve actually noticed this at all says something, but I certainly wouldn’t describe his speech as ungrammatical.
One thing that is unacceptable is to substitute “for” for “because” in e.g. “Because I am from Alpha Draconis, I am not bound by your puny human rules of grammar.” But I don’t think it follows from this that “For I am from Alpha Draconis” by itself is therefore a mere sentence fragment.
But I think this starts bordering on mere labelling rather than substantive issues. Is “Because I say so?” a sentence?
I have heard many people begin sentences with “and” and “but” (and have done so myself); I have never heard anyone begin a sentence with “for” (a word which is very marginal in US English as anything but a preposition), and have certainly never done so myself — I can’t even imagine a situation in which it would be plausible. I agree with Rodger C: in my version of English, it’s simply not a thing.
Is “Because I say so?” a sentence?
Because Kusaal grammar is normative for all human language*, I am obliged to point out that there are two ways to say “because he says so” in Kusaal:
on yɛl ala la zug
he.NOMINALISER say thus the upon
and the probably more recent but still entirely idiomatic
Bɔzugɔ o yɛl ala.
because he say thus
The first expression is an adverbial noun-phrase, and not even a complete clause; the second is an independent main clause, and is actually explicitly marked as such by the tones of the verb (which is low, but would be high if the clause was subordinate.) Formally, bɔzugɔ is not even a conjunction, but a clause-level adverb.
* Formerly, it was believed that Latin grammar was normative for all human language, but advances in modern linguistics have revealed that this belief was incorrect, and was based on mere chance resemblences between Latin and Kusaal.
in my version of English, it’s simply not a thing
I wonder if this could be yet another US/UK thing?
It could very well be.
For is subordinating, which means it can’t normally be fronted without another conjunction to license a second clause. Because I say so, is informal. Since I say so, is extremely awkward. For I say so, seems to me to be simply impossible. See here for a great deal of additional detail, including the point that, For he’s a jolly good fellow, is allowed by the fact that there is another conjunction immediately following it in the lyrics, even if that second line is commonly omitted.
Denn (diese Konjunktion liebte Naphta ganz besonders; sie gewann etwas Triumphierend-Unerbittliches in seinem Munde, und seine Augen hinter den Brillengläsern blitzten auf, jedesmal wenn er sie einfügen konnte)
I often use denn that way, to drive a stake into the heart of discursively impudent puppies. How else to use it? But my eyes don’t flash triumphantly, at least I don’t think they do. I rely on reason, I don’t need eyeshadow or other special effects.
I see what you mean, but I think your argument would also mean that “and” and “but” could never begin a sentence. Many sentences could not be spoken out of the blue to initiate a conversation, but need to be set up by preceding context; that doesn’t mean they aren’t sentences.
That’s a good point, so let me rephrase (not speaking for Rodger):
In my idea of English, “and” and “but” have to go between the conjuncts, no matter where they are in prosodic sentences. A subordinate clause starting with “for” has to go after the main clause it’s attached to, regardless of where it is in a prosodic sentence—unlike a similar subordinate clause starting with “because”, “since”, or “as”.
Since I used the word “conjunct”, I should probably say that I’m far from an expert in grammatical terminology. Corrections to my terminology will be gratefully accepted and not mistaken for substantive disagreement.
I take the “For” that begins the not-all-that-great poem “HIgh Flight”, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., to be affectation. More on “Jolly Good Fellow” later, maybe.
Is Jerry Friedman talking about a variant text of “High Flight” (whose canonical text as best as I can confirm via some googling does not include the word “For”) or did he mean to refer to another perhaps not-all-that-great poem?
More generally, while the bounds of “poetic license” (i.e. it permits some deviations from normal syntax that would be unacceptable in other contexts but certainly not all deviations from normal syntax) are interesting, I’m not sure that the possible acceptability of sentence-initial “For” in poetry (is poetry even really made up of normal sentences an overwhelming majority of the time?) tells you anything about its acceptability in general, although if it were unacceptable even in poetry that I guess would be evidence that it’s unacceptable in general.
Dickens, Dombey and Son, chapter IX, for not only at the beginning of sentence, but introducing a whole paragraph:
This can in now way be construed as subordination.
For is subordinating, which means it can’t normally be fronted without another conjunction to license a second clause
“For” is certainly usually (see below) subordinating, but that can’t be a relevant factor: “because” is subordinating, but you can front it quite happily: “Because I am Welsh, I sing beautifully.” What you can’t do, is put a subordinate “for”-clause in front of a corresponding main clause.
I suppose one could leverage that into the following syllogism:
(a) finite “for”-clauses cannot be subordinate to a following clause
(b) finite “for”-clauses are always subordinate
Therefore, a finite “for”-clause must always be subordinate to a preceding clause, regardless of prosody; if there is no such clause, it must have been ellipted*, or it must in some way be implied by the discourse context.
But I think you can too have finite “for”-clauses in such positions, though perhaps not if you are American, or too bothered about sounding precious.
I’d get out of this syllogistic trap by denying premise (b): even if clauses of this kind are formally subordinate, they can nevertheless appear as main clauses via “Insubordination”
https://www.academia.edu/24481368/Insubordination_and_its_uses
This is a very trendy syntactic topic: I haven’t just made it up. Nicholas Evans came up with the idea, and gave it its (perhaps not altogether happy) name when analysing Kayardild (WEIRDEST LANGUAGE EVAH) but it turns up all the time once you start looking. For example, in a great many languages (especially in Africa, but elsewhere too) non-initial main clauses carrying on the main thread of a narrative have at least some features of formal subordination.
Subordination versus coordination is in general a much less clearcut issue than people think. It’s given me endless hours of innocent enjoyment pursuing the literature on this.
* “Ellipsis” is potentially the same kind of get-out-of-jail free card in syntax analysis as “dialect mixture” is in historical linguistics. In both cases, they can be entirely real phenomena – it’s just that little bit too easy to imagine convenient ellipted material or posit an (unfortunately otherwise unattested) dialect with just the righf properties …
And how to translate Latin nam in any other way than by for (that’s how the dictionaries translate it). For example this passage from Cicero’s Philippics (1.5):
The Loeb translation (Shackleton-Bailey, revised by Ramsey and Manuwald) uses for.
I would use “because.” I simply do not have “for” in that sense.
The funniest thing about my mistake that J. W. Brewer pointed out is that I’d actually looked at the text without noticing the first word. The second-funniest is that Google knows of a few other people who have made the same strange mistake. Maybe we share a source or something.
Here’s some poetic For-fronting (or inversion-for-focus, if you like), by the young and still somewhat sloppy-sentimental Yeats:
“For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.”
I can imagine that happening in a less-poetic conversational context. “For a lousy mess of crummy pottage, your stupid brother threw his birthright away!”
But that’s the preposition, which (I think) is not what we’re talking about.
The thing about “High Flight” is that for the scansion to work the poet needs a filler-syllable to kick off the first line. “For” would serve the purpose adequately, had he chosen to use it. “Oh” is kinda lame although I guess better than “um.” I guess he wasn’t of the generation that uses “so” as a filler-word with little semantic content other than marking the introduction/commencement of a new story. “So I’ve slipped the surly bonds of earth, right?”
@Brett: I disagree that it’s the “which” or “and” in “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” that licenses the “For”. Most English speakers would never say, “*For that method has never worked, we should try something else,” and would equally never say, “*For that method has never worked, which you can’t deny, we should try something else.” With exceptions in Wales?
I agree with John Cowan in the thread you linked to that the main clause of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” was originally a preceding toast or a response to it.
@ulr: Though that “For” starts a paragraph, I’d say it’s subordinated. The passage could be shortened to
“I’ll mention it if you’ll let me in,” said Walter, for he was repelled by a wooden fortification.
“For” could be replaced by “because”; it introduces the explanation of why he asks to be let in. It’s a bit odd because it explains only part of the speech, and because in the original version, the “said Walter” is far from the “for” clause.
The “preposition” in the sense “because of” and the whatever-else-you-call-it in the sense “because” are pretty close neighbors semantically, I should say, although maybe semantics/shemantics is the response to that.
Is this (more young Yeats) the sense of “for” you want?
For ill things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
This is a free-standing sentence (at least in punctuation), but the “For” has been set up by prior sentences in the discourse so it’s not coming out of nowhere.
Panov has a very nice article on what he calls, in the cute fashion of typologists, enimitives (here, draft here.) He defines them as “markers of uncontroversial information”. The article opens with quotes from The Emperor’s New Clothes in three languages: “Men han har jo ikke noget på”, “Aber er hat ja nichts an”, “Da ved’ on golyj”. English initial for won’t work in this context (and English is not one of the thirty languages he examines), but where it does, it is of this flavor.
The “preposition” in the sense “because of” and the whatever-else-you-call-it in the sense “because” are pretty close neighbors semantically
The verb “to water” and the noun “water” are close neighbors semantically, too; that doesn’t mean you can trade one for the other.
@JWB:
The Gospel According to CEGL is that subordinators of that type actually are (a subset) of prepositions.
I found this notion quite helpful with Kusaal syntax: all but two Kusaal prepositions are actually loanwords, and unlike the home-grown variety, all the loans can also introduce a finite clause as subordinators (e.g. hali, “up to, as far as; until.”)
Be that as it may, I can and do say “he did it for the money” but I cannot say “he stole it, for he was poor.” Any analysis that claims the two are the same is fallacious.
The crux to me would be: what distinguishes a discourse marker from a subordinator? For example, “He locked the door every night, because his was not the safest neighborhood” (subordinator), vs. “He locked the door every night; after all, his was not the safest neighborhood” (discourse marker). If you substitute “for” for “because” or “after all”, which is it? In spoken language, are they distinguished solely by prosody?
@Hat:
Sure they’re different: the difference is that in one case, “for” takes a NP, and in the other, a finite clause.
Myself, I could say “he stole it, for he was poor”, though it sounds a bit Brothers Grimm. My colleague whom I mentioned above would probably say it by default.
A simple analogy from Kusaal, the Universal Speech, will explain all:
In Kusaal asɛɛ is “except for, unless”; it can take a NP or a clause:
Sɔ’ kae an sʋ’ʋm asɛɛ Wina’am gʋllim.
anyone NEGATIVE.exist [LINKER] be goodness except God only.NEGATIVE
“None is good but God alone.”
M kʋ basif ka fʋ keŋɛ asɛɛ ka fʋ niŋi m zug bareka.
I NEGATIVE.IRREALIS release.you and you go.NEGATIVE except and you do my head blessing
“I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Wʋʋ means “like, resembling”: it can only take an NP, and if a clause follows it, the clause has to be nominalised first:
O zɔt wʋʋ bʋŋ nɛ
he run.IMPERFECTIVE like donkey FOCUS
“He runs like a donkey.”
O zɔt wʋʋ bʋŋi zɔt si’em.
he run.IMPERFECTIVE like donkey.NOMINALISER run.IMPERFECTIVE how
“He runs like a donkey runs.”
So for me, “for” works like asɛɛ; for you, like wʋʋ.
@David Eddyshaw: I meant to say for is coordinating, not subordinating. (Type in on smart phone; repent at desktop.)
@Jerry Friedman: My own, perhaps unusual idiomatic understanding is that, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” is only licensed by the facts that it is verse and has another (often elided) conjunction after it.
@Y:
I don’t think “for” in “He locked the door every night, for his was not the safest neighborhood” can be taken as a discourse marker. It’s surely functioning just like “because” would in that context.
Panov’s examples with scope only over a clause constituent seem to me to be examples of topicalisation, whereas those with scope over the entire clause seem to be something quite different: clausal adverbs, syntactically, with discourse-level meanings.
Kusaal actually uses its particle nɛ as almost the antonym of this: when it has scope over a constituent, it’s focus, and when it has scope over a whole VP it’s kinda mirative:
O da’ nɛ bʋŋ.
“She’s bought a donkey.” (E.g. replying to “What has she bought?”)
O da’ bʋŋ nɛ.
“She’s gone and bought a donkey!” (Didn’t see that coming!)
True.
Indeed, my dialect simply can’t do what Kafka did there.
I don’t think “for” in “He locked the door every night, for his was not the safest neighborhood” can be taken as a discourse marker. It’s surely functioning just like “because” would in that context.
Ah, but my second sentence has a semicolon before the second clause, representing a different melody, which “after all” requires. So, I ask, isn’t “for” a discourse marker when used with that melody?
it’s a bit odd because it explains only part of the speech, and because in the original version, the “said Walter” is far from the “for” clause.
That seems to introduce a notion of a “discontinuous sentence”, in which the components can be separated by (in principle) arbitrarily long syntactically unconnected elements. That is … non-standard.
I think this is the mistake that I was originally flagging up: many perfectly well-formed independent sentences require some preceding (or implied) context to be acceptable. In fact, all sentences containing anaphoric pronouns are in this category:
“He laughed at them.”
So this can’t be a criterion of sentencehood – or subordination.
@Y:
I think you need a comma after “for” to do that; in that case, I would say that you could get just the same effect with “He locked the door every night; because, his was not the safest neighborhood.”
Rather that supposing that the intonation has transformed the “because” (or the “for”) into a discourse marker, I’d take that as focussing the word. I don’t think it actually ends up with the “after all” sense at all.
This is all highly language-dependent: as I said above, in Kusaal
Bɔzugɔ o yɛl ala.
“Because he says so.” (Or “For he says so”, for me and my Welsh colleague but not Hat.)
bɔzugɔ, despite the perfectly accurate translation, is not actually even a conjunction, let alone a subordinating conjunction: it really is an adverb, with scope over the whole clause, relating the clause to the discourse context. Different languages divide up this kind of work in quite different ways in their syntax.
Who generalises is lost …
would equally never say, “*For that method has never worked, which you can’t deny, we should try something else.” With exceptions in Wales?
No exception in Wales: finite “for”-clauses can’t be used as subirdinate clauses before a main clause, unlike “because”-clauses. But such restrictions don’t necessarily reflect anything about whether the relevant clauses are necessarily ungrammatical if standing alone.
Lots of languages have restrictions about what kinds of clause elements may be shifted in front of the clause, sometimes systematic (in Kusaal, you can do it with time adverbials, but not place adverbials, for example) and sometimes more capricious.
(Note that I keep saying “finite” for a reason; English non-finite “for”-clauses are quite another thing. “For me to admit this, you would need to appeal to my better nature.”)
@DE, sorry, I meant the intonation at the end of the first clause. “…every night³¹; for²…” vs. “…every night², for²…”
prudence
i do not think a prudent one
will ever aim too high
a cockroach seldom whips a dog
and seldom should he try
and should a locust take a vow
to eat a pyramid
he likely would wear out his teeth
before he ever did
i do not think the prudent one
hastes to initiate
a sequence of events which he
lacks power to terminate
for should i kick the woolworth tower
so hard i laid it low
it probably might injure me
if it fell on my toe
i do not think the prudent one
will be inclined to boast
lest circumstances unforseen
should get him goat and ghost
for should i tell my friends i d drink
the hudson river dry
a tidal wave might come and turn
my statements to a lie
archy
KJV, Letter to the Hebrews, 8:
The “for / wherefore” in 8:3, in particular, is hard to reconcile with a ‘because’ subordination.
@Y:
Ah – I see.
That seems to me to be introducing a prosodic break which forces the interpretation of the “for”-clause as not-subordinate, so I would actually take that as further evidence that a finite “for”-clause can be grammatical on its own (in an appropriate overall discourse context.)
I don’t think this induces a different interpretation of “for” from the very apt-Dombey-and-Son example that ulr found, or my poetical ones.
Whether that involves a syntactic reanalysis of the preposition/subordinator as a “discourse marker” is an interesting question. The fact that it is functioning as “because” doesn’t rule that out from a theoretical standpoint – as my Kusaal example actually demonstrates.
You might say that my hypothetical “insubordination” process, which has promoted a fundamentally subordinate structure to main-clause status, has transformed the preposition/subordinator into a discourse marker. But to my mind, that doesn’t really achieve anything more than the actual invocation of “insubordination” did already – the actual meaning of the “for” has not changed at all. It seems superfluous to descriptive requirements, and I would suspect it of being a dodge to avoid facing up to the fact that in reality it’s all just the same old “for.”
In fact, here I’m just channelling the spirit of CGEL’s analysis of subordinators of this type as actually being (a subset of) prepositions. The alternative is to say that English seems to have an awful lot of clause subordinators, which, by chance, are hoimophonous with prepositions of very similar meanings.
Again, if you analyse “for” as a discourse marker whenever it appears sentence initially, surely the argument applies just as well (or better) to “because,” That seems to entail the conclusion that “because” is a different word in
“Because I love you.”
and
“I put up with you because I love you.”
with
“Because I love you, I put up with you.”
as something of analytical puzzle.
I can produce excellent arguments from Kusaal syntax that bɔzugɔ “because” is, in that language, indeed always a discourse marker and not a conjunction or subordinator.* Doing so for English “because” seems more challenging. Unless one simply declares that English happens to have a homophonous pair “because” (subordinator) and “because” (discourse marker.)
* OK, it also means “why?” Let’s not go there …
FWIW, I’d go with denn for both; the few translations I can quickly find online all have denn for the first, but plainly omit it in the second and start with various “if” constructions, even though denn wenn “because if” is completely unobjectionable.
I do agree that independent For- sentences/clauses exist.
I am surprised that Evans had to invent the term “insubordination”. The phenomenon is so widespread, even in old-world languages, but oddly it hasn’t been recognized and named by some old grammarians or rhetoricians, similarly to, say, ‘rhetorical questions’.
The Greek has γὰρ in verse 3 and μὲν οὖν in verse 4, I see.
The Kusaal version ignores the first and just has ka “and” for the second. I suppose the idea is that the sense that all this is meant as a step-by-step argument is sufficiently clear from the overall context, and doesn’t need to be flagged up specifically. True dat.
The Mooré introduces verse 3 with sɩd me, literally “truth too”, which does in fact mean “en effet”, and just starts verse 4 with la “and.” The Mampruli version starts verse 3 with dama “because” and has nothing particular for 4.
The phenomenon is so widespread
Sure is. I think a lot of it is about recognising that while ellipsis may well have produced a lot of these constructions historically, there is no justification for calling them elliptical synchronically. It turns up a lot with clefting and preposing constructions in Kusaal, which practically scream “I originated via ellipse of all but the last constituent of the main clause”, but look pretty monoclausal currently. I was helped on the theoretical side by a very thorough investigation of a closely parallel set of constructions in Hausa, carried out by Melanie Green.* There’s a lot of good stuff on things like focus and topicalisation in Hausa, which must be easily the most thoroughly investigated language of Subsaharan Africa.
* My copy was previously owned by the author’s mother, which seems sad somehow.
What you can’t do, is put a subordinate “for”-clause in front of a corresponding main clause.
That’s what I’m saying.
I think this is the mistake that I was originally flagging up: many perfectly well-formed independent sentences require some preceding (or implied) context to be acceptable. In fact, all sentences containing anaphoric pronouns are in this category:
“He laughed at them.”
So this can’t be a criterion of sentencehood – or subordination.
I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t using that as a criterion of sentencehood. I did say it was subordination, but I don’t object if you say that a sentence break, indicated by punctuation or prosody, or still more a paragraph break, means there’s no subordination. But I do say that when “for” means “because”, there’s always a main clause that bears the same semantic relation to the “for” clause, and it’s always before the “for” clause.
That’s based on my experience, not a theoretical argument. So far we’ve seen two exceptions by sane people. In “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, I’m not making up the idea that it was originally sung after a toast. Two of the notes on early uses at the Wikiparticle are such examples, and the others don’t give the context. (One of the notes is a story that a group of British officers sang the song in Russia after a toast in Russian—which turned out to be to the Tsarina! Everybody had a good laugh.)
The other exception is the passage from the King James translation of Hebrews, and I don’t understand that “for”. It doesn’t look like a “because” to me.
By the way, in the first chapter of The Return of the King, Tolkien not only started a paragraph with a “For”, he put a blank line before it. You may be able to see it at Google Books. If not, the sentences are
It goes on to say that the gates don’t line up, so the road winds. That resembles the quotation from Dombey and Son in that the “For” explains a minor part of the corresponding sentence, not the main part. Coincidence?
By the way again, like Hat I don’t use “for” to mean “because”, but (possibly unlike him) in this case I’m not sure I could replace the “For” with “Because” or any other word. Maybe it’s just that by that point Tolkien has me used to “For clauses” punctuated as sentences.
On another topic, the Wikipedia article on discourse makers lists “because” in, as far as I can tell, the ordinary sense.
At least in the Archy and Mehitabel examples, the for-clause (or whatever) presents an example illustrating the main clause. Whereas because is deductive, for is inductive.
Even more fun: Early Modern English has for because.
@JF:
Sure, for-clauses of this kind are effectively anaphoric; as are sentences introduced by “therefore”, and many other types.
The original assertion was that “for” as finite-clause introducer can’t begin a sentence. I think we have amply demonstrated that, yes, it can and does, though this is not part of everyone’s idiolect, and often has a literary flavour.
Denying this involves invoking an ad-hoc definition of “sentence” inconsistent with the normal meaning of the term, whether as used by linguists (those who find it a useful term at all) or US schoolteachers.
(I suppose you could do it with “a sentence expresses a complete thought”, which sometimes turns up as a supposed definition; but this is a perfectly hopeless definition of “sentence”, as a moment’s reflection should show any bright schoolchild, even if not their teacher.)
It occurs to me that “because” clauses are less capable of standing alone than finite “for” clauses.
“Because I say so” (followed by mic drop) seems to me to have an even stronger implication that you’re referring to something immediately preceding in the discourse (most likely spoken by your interlocutor), therefore appearing semantically incomplete, than (for example) “For I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother.” (Tennyson at his worst …)
This might give some support to the idea (from Brett, I think it was) that “for” is in some sense not as subordinatingish as “because”, and/or Y’s ideas of thediscourse-markerness of finite-clause-introducing “for.”
I notice that although you can say “and because”, you can’t say “and for” if “for” is meant as a finite-clause introducer. I’m not sure quite how that fits in to the picture.
Equivalents of this “for” in other languages are indeed often more in the nature of discourse particles: like Latin enim*, Greek γάρ. That doesn’t prove anything about the English syntax, of course, but it’s still interesting.
* Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
“Kill them, for the Lord knows which are his” is correct as a translation; “Kill them, because the Lord knows which are his” is actually subtly incorrect, because the Lord’s omniscience is implied to be the reason for the slaughter rather than an excuse for it.
To be honest, I have no idea what “for” (in these contexts) means if it doesn’t mean “because.” That’s how not-part-of-my-dialect it is.
I wonder if Y (or others) feels the same contrast between
“Kill them, because the Lord knows which are his”
and
“Kill them, for the Lord knows which are his”
as I do? I don’t feel that I’m seeing a distinction where none exists (which can happen – it’s easy to start imagining that every formal difference has to encode some semantic difference, but it ain’t necessarily so.)
(Obviously the question is irrelevant for those, like Hat, for whom the “for” variant is just not acceptable at all.)
I was thinking about the usage of “for” with an infinitive that wiktionary asserts (plausibly) is now “obsolete outside dialect or poetic use.”* E.g.
I’m going to Louisiana / My true love for to see.
There were three men came out of the West / Their fortunes for to try.
Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew / Where felons and criminals dwell.
I can’t think immediately think of an example that inverts the order and starts off with the “For to VERB” bit for focus, but I don’t think I would rule out such a construction as non-cromulent on general principles.
*Wiktionary classifies this as a “conjunction” rather than “preposition.” I take it CGEL would disagree.
I take it CGEL would disagree.
Yes. Not (I think) that it makes much odds.
“For” with the infinitive is of course very much alive and well as a way of giving a to-infinitive construction an explicit subject:
And some kinds of love, the possibilities are endless:
And for me to miss one would seem to be groundless.
Welsh does something similar using the preposition i “to, for”:
cyn mynd
before go
“before going”
cyn i mi fynd
before to me go
“before I go”
where mynd is the verbal noun corresponding to af “I go.” This seems to be an innovation since Middle Welsh, but it’s used in contexts too unlike the English to be a syntactic borrowing, I reckon. And there probably weren’t enough Welsh-English bilinguals around at the time to make that a likely scenario anyway.
This is a free-standing sentence (at least in punctuation), but the “For” has been set up by prior sentences in the discourse so it’s not coming out of nowhere.
as i read back through a day or so of this thread, i’m struck by how much the idea of the sentence seems to be getting in the way of understanding what’s happening. now, i don’t think the damn things exist as an element of language anyhow – i see them as purely a matter of writing conventions for certain registers, which should be taken about as seriously (because they do affect usage) as, and with equivalent disdain to, condemnations of infinitive-splitting and such. and, to my way of thinking, shouldn’t be used as a unit in analytic contexts, since they’re intrusions that mainly have the effect of making those written registers not reflect the lects that people actually speak (and, often, in my experience when i worked as a writing tutor, of making their writing massively less comprehensible).
so i kinda think what matters here is entirely (to edit JWB a little) the ways that “the “For” has been set up by prior [elements of] the discourse so it’s not coming out of nowhere”, operating at different scales, none of which have much if anything to do with where prescriptivists want to see a little dot on the page. i don’t have any particular insight on how those elements work, systematically, but i do think that some of the slightly younger (early-to-mid-30s) people in my life use “for” in the sense of “because” a lot more than i and my age-cohort do.
prose is a lie!
m. jourdain was a vers-libre poet!
breaks not dots!
i do think that some of the slightly younger (early-to-mid-30s) people in my life use “for” in the sense of “because” a lot more than i and my age-cohort do.
Another sign
of the apocalypsethat I’m seriously out of touch.@DE:
Sure, for-clauses of this kind are effectively anaphoric; as are sentences introduced by “therefore”, and many other types.
The point, as you and I and others have said, is that because-clauses, and causal as- and since-clauses, don’t have to be anaphoric.
My for-favouring colleague is quite a bit younger than me (he was my trainee back in Ancient Times.)
CGEL doesn’t use “sentence” in its technical vocabulary. But clauses, main, subordinate or whatever, are a real thing at all levels of formality (though perhaps not always in the way traditional grammar-teaching had it.) I don’t think the grammatical description of any language can do without “clause” (and I have seen descriptions that try very hard to do without “word.”)
@JF:
Did I say that? I didn’t mean to, if so. But I don’t mean “anaphoric” in the proper narrow technical sense there: I mean “critically dependent on prior material in the discourse to be acceptable”, which is a kind of Greater Anaphora.* What I’m asserting is that that kind of context-dependency needn’t prevent a clause from being a self-standing not-subordinate main clause syntactically (commonly known as a “sentence.”)
* I will illustrate the deep similarity among these concepts with examples from Kusaal, if friendly persuasion fails.
Today’s Young People seem to have abandoned the good old practice of beginning sentences (sorry, “self-standing not-subordinate main clauses”) with capital-F “Forasmuch.”
@JF:
Oh, I misunderstood your point. I do say that because-clauses, and causal as- and since-clauses, have to be “anaphoric” – when used without a following main clause.
“Because I said so.”
is just as anaphoricoid as “For I’m to be queen of the May.” But because-clauses can be cataphoric too (“Because he lives, I can face tomorrow”), while finite for-clauses can’t.
Clauses introduced by “therefore” are like finite for-clauses: they can only be anaphoric, never cataphoric. This behaviour is not confined to for-clauses, in other words. And sentences like “Therefore, I shall surely conquer the world before the weekend” do not have to put up with being falsely accused of being subordinate. (The Death Ray will see to that.)
Personal pronouns are like “because”, though with a different preferred strategy. They’re normally anaphoric, but do turn up in cataphoric use: “If he really tries hard enough, an Englishman can sing almost as well as a Welshman.”
I seem to have started quite a discussion in my absence, and as usual, because I expressed myself too laconically. I simply meant that one can say “Because it was raining, we played cards” and not *”For it was raining, we played cards.” More generally, that (as has been pointed out) initial “for” functions essentially like initial “and” and “but.”
As for “We played cards, because/for it was raining,” the meaning of a word and its function are two different things. Note that the sentence requires a comma with “for” and not with “because.”
the meaning of a word and its function are two different things
Don’t let St Ludwig hear you!
But how do you mean? I agree that the sentences have different meanings (what do you think of my Cathar-massacre sentences above, by the way?) But I would claim that they have just the same syntax (I think.) How would you analyse them?
Do you mean (as Brett and Y seemed to be suggesting) that the “for” clause is (as it were) “less subordinate” than the “because” clause? (Both seem to be “supplements” rather than “complements” – the sentence is fine without either of them.)
Ah! You’ve nailed it!
CGEL actually has a section on this very phenomenon (15, 2.11, p1321.) It says that “for” (in this sense) “falls at the boundary between coordinators and prepositions (prepositions that take clausal complements, thus subordinating conjunctions in a traditional analysis.)”
This is the reason why “for” (in this sense) can’t be preceded by “and” – as I noted above, without being able to account for the restriction.
The passage puts “only” and resultative “so that” in the same category, though said category is effectively defined negatively, in that these forms lack some of the properties distinguishing prototypical coordinators from prepositions with clausal complements. They spend the next couple of pages going into the details of it all.
Looks like I (at any rate) have been reinventing the wheel here.
So, yes: this is an instance of a fuzzy boundary between coordination and subordination in English. As Brett, Y and Rodger C were all suggesting.
David E, I meant the opposite: that my sentences had essentially the same meaning, but different structures. But as you go on to say, “for” is by no means a clear-cut example of a coordinator. So here we are.
Do you find the Cathar Massacre sentences completely synonymous too? Maybe it’s just me, although from earlier comments, I suspect that Y might find the meanings different too. We seem to have three possibilities:
“For” is not possible here (Hat)
“For” and “because” are completely synonymous here (you)
“For” and “because” have similar yet distinct meanings here (me)
Be that as it may, your point about punctuation does correlate with what CEGL analyses as a real syntactic difference between “for” and “because” even in this position (and thus quite apart from the other distributional differences); Y was implying something similar.
“For” is not possible here (Hat)
Just to be clear, I recognize “Kill them, for the Lord knows which are his” as perfectly good English — it’s simply antiquated and not part of my personal dialect. But for me it is synonymous with “Kill them, because the Lord knows which are his,” and I can’t even imagine what the alleged difference might be.
Yes: “Hat” here was simply an abbreviation for “Hattese.” (The best attested language of the Dodsonic family.)
Kill them, because the Lord knows which are his.
To me, this is a non sequitur. If the latter is the “cause” of the former, you might just the same kill anybody and everybody.
So I now propose (subject to revisions) that because-clauses imply a logical conclusion, and that for-clauses can be used that way, but also more generally, to introduce supporting information.
All this bearing in mind the pragmatic difference between the two, which makes it challenging to come up with good contrastive examples.
“For” and “because” are not exactly synonymous. In the Cathar Massacre sentences, “because” seems to me to imply a direct causal relation (between the Cathars’ killability and the Lord’s knowledge) which isn’t logically justified. The “for” sentence makes more sense: “Kill them all; after all, …”: the Lord’s knowledge being a condition, not a cause, of the Cathars’ murderableness.
Seems like I’m not alone (phew!)
Those match my interpretations too.
the Lord’s knowledge being a condition, not a cause, of the Cathars’ murderableness.
Material, formal, efficient and final causes are easy to confuse with each other. None of them is ever at work alone. They don’t do home office.
I think that this semantic difference can be correlated with the syntax: whereas the “because” clause is unequivocally subordinate, the finite “for” clause is more amphibious, with a “semi-coordinating” relationship to the preceding clause. In other words, it’s less tightly integrated both structurally and semantically (in line with Y’s earlier intuition.)
Evidently any semantic difference has been neutralised for many speakers, though.
The quasi-coordinating character of the “for” clause is further reflected in
(a) the fact that “and” cannot precede this “for”
(b) the fact that such “for” clauses can (at least in some registers, and for some speakers) appear as independent clauses with no evidence of ellipsis and separated by quite a long way from any “antecedent.” Neither of these things are true of isolated “because” clauses: they are very informal (as opposed to hifalutin or poetical), and strongly imply a closely preceding “antecedent.”
I think this can also be exploited to account for the distributional restriction that such a “for” clause may not precede its “antecedent.” In
“We played cards, because it was raining.”
“because it was raining” is a subordinate clause fiunctioning as a clause-level adverb, and can be fronted without moving out of the scope of the main clause:
“Because it was raining, we played cards.”
The same is true of pronoun reference:
“We used John‘s cards, because he‘d planned ahead for this.”
“Because he‘d planned ahead for this, we used John‘s cards.”
On the other hand
“We played cards, for it was raining.”
is in part analogous to the unequivocally coordinating:
“We used John‘s cards, and he‘d planned ahead for this.”
which cannot be transposed to
“He‘d planned ahead for this, and we used John‘s cards.”
This depends on an analogy between the linguistic coding of cause and effect and pronoun anaphora, but I think I could substantiate that.
AFAIK, enim works like German nämlich: it isn’t causal. I’d either not translate it into English at all (like particles generally) or, in a pinch, go for “after all” (…and now I see so has Rodger C). Or “you see,” perhaps (with the comma): “The Lord, you see, knows which ones are His.”
the finite “for” clause is more amphibious, with a “semi-coordinating” relationship to the preceding clause.
“amphibious”?
Many a time … was I tempted to relinquish the fight; yet was I prevented from that fateful step …
There’s several versions of that Churchill quote, not all using ‘yet’. Indeed not clear whether he actually said it or wrote it in private correspondence/not aimed at Chamberlain so personally. [Phil Goff is a long-standing middle-brow political hack. He’s entirely capable of mangling Churchill quotes.]
Yet it seems a perfectly cromulent coordinating use of ‘yet’.
Amphibious.
I thought about “ambidextrous”, but decided to adopt the more euphonious exact synonym instead.
yet was I
VSO rules. It is the Way of my People.
To one of David E.’s examples, you could (to my ear, and with appropriate context already established) do ““He‘d planned ahead for this, so we used John‘s cards.” Which I guess just establishes that “so” is not primarily “coordinating”?
Both fish and fowl.
Verb-second.
yet was I
Reverse alphabetical ordering. Sure, you laugh now…
Your best resource if you’re doubtful of a Churchill quote is the International Churchill Society’s Fake Quotes page, and yep, that one’s on it. They quote a vaguely similar verified version “I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.” Wikiquote provides the more similar: “Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”
Reminds me of how questions work in Sumerian.