Functions of Language - Online First

This paper identifies just so you know and it just so happens as emerging discourse markers in American English, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Both discourse markers started to appear around the middle of the 20th century but differ in their discourse functions and development. Just so you know is used for cancelling implicatures, expressing emphasis, indicating topic shift or specifying a preceding utterance. (It) just so happens, on the other hand, signals an unexpected, yet relevant piece of information. In terms of their development, only just so you know has so far managed to gain a firm foothold in terms of frequency, exhibiting also a high degree of productivity in the form of a whole family of related discourse marker uses (e.g. just so you understand, just so we’re clear). Both discourse markers are identified as resulting from cooptation, but with different degrees of subsequent grammaticalization. The less successful development of (it) just so happens is attributed to the prior existence of a functional competitor, viz. as it happens, and possibly its different source construction, viz. a matrix rather than an adverbial clause.

On the basis of Present-day English corpus data, this paper investigates deliberate, adaptive linguistic innovations from a constructional perspective. The concrete phenomena addressed include the XYZ construction (“Copenhagen is the Paris of Denmark”), the X be not the Y-est Z in the Q construction (“He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”), extrasentential not (“This is nice. Not.”), X much (“racist much?”), and the because X construction (“because science”). The paper first identifies speaker extravagance and sociocognitive salience as major factors in these innovations (Haspelmath 1999; Keller 1995; Schmid & Günther 2016). A second question is how these deliberate and noticeable (salient, extravagant) innovations spread and may become routinized and conventionalized, or may even turn into abstract productive patterns. From a constructional perspective, structures may be copied verbatim, leading to an increase in token frequency. A simple increase in token frequency may already result in conventionalization and loss of salience (bleaching). But constructions may not only be copied verbatim. Language users may detect some abstract patterning, which, in turn, can then be used productively. The result would not necessarily be an increase in token, but in type frequency, resulting in snowcloning and general productivity. Arguably, this may lead to a slower loss of salience, e.g., while the abstract pattern and some individual instances become generally less salient, some new, innovative tokens may still be considered extravagant and may keep the pattern productive and noticeable. At the same time, constructions may undergo shifts in their particular constraints (e.g., for slot fillers).