Cover not available
Article published In:
Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. Jucker
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 164–179

The rise of a concessive “category reassessment” construction

But fear all the same

| Stanford University

In the Late Modern English period, several expressions arose with concessive ‘despite what might be expected’ meaning, among them anyway, nonetheless and all the same (Lenker 2010). The topic of this paper is the rise of the specialized concessive construction “but (be) X all the same”. In the full rhetorical formula of which it is a part, X is initially represented as not having properties Y but nevertheless as having sufficient other relevant properties to be classified as X, as in “…fear. It is not the eye-rolling, quaking fear seen in police states, but it is fear all the same” (1963 coha). Here the writer concedes that there is fear despite Y (see Horn [1991] on “redundant information”) and invites the addressee to reinterpret the initial X retrospectively (see Haselow [2013] on functions of “final particles”). Using data mainly from clmet3.0 and coha, I discuss the conventionalization of this construction in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar and argue alongside, for example, Goldberg (2004); Cappelle (2017) and Finkbeiner (2019) that pragmatics should be given a larger role in construction grammar than has often been the case in the past.

Keywords: concessives, Diachronic Construction Grammar, procedurals, redundancy, rhetorical strategy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.A brief outline of the rise of the concessive connective marker all the same
  • 4.Phrasal adjunct use of all the same in “but (be) X all the same”
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1From a pragmatic perspective
    • 5.2From a constructional perspective
    • 5.3From a Diachronic Construction Grammar perspective
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00051.tra
References

Corpora

clmet 3.0. The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 1710–1920, version 3.0 (clmet3.0) compiled by Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller and Jukka Tyrkkö. Leuven University. See: [URL]
coca  Corpus of Contemporary American English 1990–2019 Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. Release March 2020. See: [URL]
coha  Corpus of Historical American English 1820–2019 Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. Release 2021 See: [URL]
eebo  Early English Books Online 1470s to 1690s Corpus created as part of the Text Creation Partnership. See: [URL]
oed  Oxford English Dictionary 2018 Oxford: Oxford University Press. See: [URL]
Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot
1983 L’argumentation dans la langue [‘ Argumentation in Language ’]. Brussels: Mardaga.Google Scholar
Barðdal, Jóhanna, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and Spike Gildea
(eds) 2015 Diachronic Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diana
2002 Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cappelle, Bert
2017 “What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions?” In Ilse Depraetere and Raphael Salkie (eds), Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, 115–151. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, William
2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. and Colin F. Baker
2001 “Frame Semantics for Text Understanding”. Proceedings of WordNet and Other Lexical Resources Workshop, 59–63. Pittsburgh: NAACL.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor
1988 “Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions”. Language 64 (3): 501–538. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Finkbeiner, Rita
2019 “Reflections on the Role of Pragmatics in Construction Grammar”. In Rita Finkbeiner (ed), On the Role of Pragmatics in Construction Grammar, special issue of Constructions and Frames 11 (2): 171–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gast, Volker
2019 “A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Concessive Connectives in English, German and Spanish: The Distribution of Although, Obwohl and Aunque in the Europarl Corpus”. In Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Adriana Cruz and Laura Nadal (eds), Empirical Studies on the Construction of Discourse, 151–191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.
1995 Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2004 “Pragmatics and Argument Structure”. In Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 538–561. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2006 Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2013 “Constructionist Approaches”. In Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, 15–31. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
2008 Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues: A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
2012 “The Semantics of Pragmatic Expressions”. In Hans-Jörg Schmid (ed), Cognitive Pragmatics, 589–613. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haselow, Alexander
2013 “Arguing for a Wide Conception of Grammar: The Case of Final Particles in Spoken Discourse”. Folia Linguistica 47 (2): 375–424. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Discourse Marker Sequences: Insights into the Serial Order of Communicative Tasks in Real-time Turn Production”. Journal of Pragmatics 146 (1): 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Horn, Laurence R.
1991 “Given as New: When Redundant Affirmation Isn’t”. Journal of Pragmatics 15 (4): 313–336. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Andreas and Andreas H. Jucker
1995 “The Historical Perspective in Pragmatics”. In Andreas H. Jucker (ed), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 3–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H.
(ed) 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Pragmatics and Discourse”. In Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs (eds), The History of English: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text, 165–184. (Volume 11.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Ekkehard
1986 “Conditionals, Concessive Conditionals and Concessives: Areas of Contrast, Overlap and Neutralization”. In Elizabeth C. Traugott, Alice ter Meulen, Judy Snitzer Reilly and Charles A. Ferguson (eds), On Conditionals, 229–246. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “Concessive Markers and Concessive Meaning: Taking Stock of What We Know and Do Not Know”. In Sabrina Zeaiter and Peter Franke (eds), Pioniergeist, Ausdauer, Leidenschaft: Festschrift zur Ehren von Prof. Dr. Jürgen Handke [‘Pioneering Spirit, Perseverance, Passion: Festschrift in Honor of Prof. Dr. Jurgen Handke’], 53–68. Open publication server, Philipps-Universiteit Marburg. ISBN 978-3-8185-0556-1; DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lenker, Ursula
2010 Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A.
2019 “Constructions Are Patterns and So Are Fixed Expressions”. In Beatrix Busse and Ruth Möhlig-Falke (eds), Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept, 193–220. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mulder, Jean and Sandra A. Thompson
2008 “The Grammaticalization of But as a Final Particle in Conversation”. In Ritva Laury (ed). Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions, 179–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu
1990 “Modeling Functional Differentiation and Function Loss: The Case of ‘But’”. In Sylvia Adamson, Vivien Law, Nigel Vincent and Susan Wright (eds), Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 337–355. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter
2019 “How Constructions are Born: The Role of Patterns in the Constructionalization of be going to INF”. In Beatrix Busse and Ruth Möhlig-Falke (eds), Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept, 157–192. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg
2017 “A Framework for Understanding Linguistic Entrenchment and its Psychological Foundations”. In Hans-Jörg Schmid (ed.), Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How we Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge, 9–35. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A.
2000 “Viewpoints and Polysemy: Linking Adversative and Causal Meanings of Discourse Markers”. In Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Bernd Kortmann (eds), Cause – Condition – Concession – Contrast: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives, 257–281. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. and Richard Waltereit
2010 “Presupposition Accommodation and Language Change: From Additivity to Speech-act Marking”. In Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte and Hubert Cuyckens (eds), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 75–102. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma and Susan Fitzmaurice
2007 “Historical Pragmatics: What It Is and How to Do It”. In Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2004 “Historical Pragmatics”. In Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 538–561. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2019 “Constructional Pattern-development in Language Change”. In Beatrix Busse and Ruth Möhlig-Falke (eds), Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept, 125–155. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022a Ten lectures on a Diachronic Constructionalist Approach to Discourse Structuring Markers. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Graeme Trousdale
2013 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme and Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2021 “Rethinking Constructionalization: The History of by the way ”. Paper presented at ISLE 6, Joensuu, June.