Myelitis

A grammatico-pragmatic analysis of the because X construction: Private expression within public expression

“…The categorial restriction on the X-element is accounted for by the construction’s expressive structure to be proposed in Section 4. Schnoebelen (2014) counts the target construction in tweets and groups all items that have 50 or more occurrences based on their parts of speech. The results are summarized in Table 1 .…”

“…In addition to these three categories, several other categories are identified. First, in comparing Tables 1 and 2 , it should be noted that Schnoebelen’s (2014) “compressed clause” is not the same as Bohmann’s (2016) “reduced clause”. In Schnoebelen’s survey of tweets, the most frequent token is yolo , which is a compression of you only live once.…”

“… Bohmann (2016: 161) also distinguishes these compressed clauses from their clausal counterparts and considers these “(semi-)lexicalized, fixed expressions”. As special forms generally convey special functions, following Schnoebelen (2014) and Bohmann (2016) , I take compressed clauses as fixed expressions with a function similar to that of interjections. 6…”

“…Thus, nouns, adjectives, interjections, and agreement words are frequently used in this construction. Compressed clauses are analyzed in a parallel fashion to interjections ( Schnoebelen 2014 ; Bohmann 2016 ). Table 2 shows that reduced clauses are also used at a considerable frequency.…”

“…also Okada 2020 ). However, pronouns are not used ( McCulloch 2014 ) or are rare ( Schnoebelen 2014 ). Mendes Junior and Mattos (2021: 37) highlight the incompatibility of function words with the construction: “[D] evido à brevidade típica de [ because X ], o item lexical que preenche a posição [X] deve ser semanticamente relevante e pertinente ao conteúdo introduzido no enunciado antes do because.…”