This paper aims to conduct a qualitative study of the use of stand-alone, or “insubordinate” (Evans 2007), because-clauses in drama texts in the Modern English period. Previous research has indicated that some because-clauses are loosely connected to the reference clause in present-day spoken English (e.g., Altenberg 1984, Schleppegrell 1991, Stenström 1996), as in Example (1): (# = tone unit boundary)
(1) do you want somewhere to warm to work# at the weekends# because there’s my place# you can
(adapted from LLC 2 4a 42 4440–4470)
Moreover, some instances of because-clauses seem to stand alone syntactically, being more loosely connected to the prior utterance, as in Example (2).
(2) A: how soon do you want these back
B: I don’t know# doesn’t really
A: because it may take us a month or so to sort of sort through them and ...
(adapted from LLC 2 2a 36 2090–37 2120)
In Examples (1) and (2), the because-clause may be analysed as being connected to the speech act being performed in the preceding reference clause and expressing intersubjective meanings (the motive for asking a question in these examples).
A similar instance of stand-alone because-clauses can be found in drama texts in the Modern English period.
(3) BEAUGARD: The truth on't is, he has deserved it long ago. But did you ever see him, Sir Davy?
SIR Dav: Sir! does he know me? <Aside.>
BEAUGARD: Because I fancy that miniature is very like him. Pray, sir, whence had it you?
(adapted from ARCHER 3.1, 1680otwa.d2b)
The because-clause in Example (3) has a similar function to those in Examples (1) and (2) above.
Since data from conversations are not available for the historical data, this study will use drama texts to observe the use of stand-alone because-clauses in a stretch of discourse (see Claridge and Walker (2001) for the discussion of the diachronic development of causal clauses in different genres).
The questions posed in the current paper are: (i) where do because-clauses appear in a stretch of discourse, especially in relation to their reference clause, in drama texts in the Modern English period? (ii) in what discourse context is a stand-alone because-clause used in drama texts? Data will be taken from the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Text and ARCHER 3.1.
ARCHER 3.1 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 3.1. 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010. Compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Fineganat, Northern Arizona University, University of Southern California, University of Freiburg, University of Heidelberg, University of Helsinki, Uppsala University, University of Michigan, University of Manchester, Lancaster University, University of Bamberg, University of Zurich, University of Trier, University of Salford and University of Santiago de Compostela.
Helsinki Corpus = Helsinki Corpus of English Text: Diachronic Part
LLC = T he London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, ICAME Collection of English Corpora, Second Edition.
Altenberg, Bengt. 1984. Causal linking in spoken and written English. Studia Linguistica 38, 20–69.
Claridge, Claudia and Walker, Terry. 2001. Causal clauses in written and speech genres in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal: Computers in English Linguistics 25:31–63.
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In: Irina Nikolaeva (ed.). Finiteness, 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schleppegrell, Mary J. 1991. Paratactic because. Journal of Pragmatics 16, 323–337.
Stenström, Anna-Brita. 1998. From sentence to discourse: Cos (because) in teenage talk. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Yael Ziv (eds.), Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory, 127–146. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.