Have you ever used ‘because’ like this: Yeah, no, because reasons? You aren’t giving a proper reason at all, you’re making a metalinguistic comment about something. Together with Ellie Cook, one of our graduates from 2020, I’m investigating this phenomenon, which you might remember is known to linguists as ‘because X’.
You might remember it because I first wrote about ‘because X’ all the way back in 2012. It was just a quick blog post noting it as an interesting construction. A couple of people talked about because becoming a preposition during 2013, notably Neal Whitman and Stan Carey. This Atlantic article appeared, quoting me and attributing it to Gretchen McCulloch (to be fair, she got it from a post where Gretchen was quoting me - though with attribution). Then it was voted as 2013's ‘Word of the Year’ by the American Dialect Society, and I did a quick study on it as a holiday project in early 2014. Well, it sort of snowballed since then, and it became obvious that this seemingly unimportant point of usage variation can tell us something about how language works.
I don't talk about it much on here, but behind the scenes I've been working on this off and on for a few years, picking away at little bits of it to find out what's going on. I've given a few conference papers and talks on the topic, including this one and this one (let me know if you want the version for college students, which is very accessible and has bonus #CheekyNandos content).
From that first survey, put together as a quick and fun project with no real aims in mind beyond finding out what the heck was happening, I discovered that although bare nouns like because reasons are frequent, it also shows up with lots of other parts of speech: because fake news is a common one (with a modified noun), and because just in case is the slogan of a well known holiday company in the UK. It also tends to be something that is a complete concept in itself with specific connotations (so because reasons means ‘because of some vague and probably not very well-thought-out unspecified reasons’). We probably share some knowledge (e.g. ‘people do things for stupid reasons or no reason at all’), and it might have a slightly tongue-in-cheek usage (e.g. ‘You and I both know that I have no good reason for this but let's pretend I do’).
Lots of careful research later, and we’ve been able to describe ‘because X’ quite precisely, as involving ‘sentence fragments’ – that is, incomplete sentences that express a whole thought. It’s like when you say Going out! in answer to the question What are you doing?. This is really unexpected because these sentence fragments, by definition, shouldn’t show up within sentences! But this is what gives them their quirky sound: doing something unexpected gives a slightly jarring pragmatic effect to make the listener realise this isn’t normal ‘because’, giving a reason, but new ‘because X’.
So what now? Well, before we can write up this research properly, we need to test a few specific things about this analysis. We've set up another survey. Where the last one necessarily took a scattergun approach, because we didn't know what was acceptable and what was not beyond just what seemed right to us, this one is more careful. Based on the predictions of a number of hypotheses, we've created another list of sentences that might sound more or less natural, and I need people's opinions on this. We need lots of people, because the more people who give their opinion, the more reliable the results are.
If you want to take part in this research, you can! You can fill in the survey here, which will take no more than ten minutes, giving your own opinion on how different sentences work with 'because X'. We really need a lot of participants to get good results, so share it with anyone you think might be interested!
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