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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 (46)
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]
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2023. “But I Hate Him Just the Same”: On the Rise of Concessive Markers with Same. Journal of English Linguistics 51:4 ► pp. 311 ff. DOI logo

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