SemFest is coming!
The annual Stanford Semantics Festival is coming, and I have two papers
on the program (making up for last year, when I was on leave and didn't
submit a paper). It's a local tradition, and a very pleasant one:
serious, but small, mixing students and faculty, with people from
several departments. Regularly on the last day of classes in
Winter Quarter,
This year, both of my papers are connected to things I've been posting
about here on Language Log. Below is a slightly expanded version
of one of them. (My apologies for its being in abstract-speak
rather than in more conversational prose.) The other will follow
in, as they say, due course.
Avoid
vagueness? The case of sentence-initial linking however
Arnold M. Zwicky & Douglas W. Kenter
When two items are very similar in meaning, but one (the Special
alternative) is in some way more specific than the other (the General
alternative), the general maxim Avoid Vagueness (AV) comes into play:
AV: Be specific; avoid vagueness.
The straightforward way to obey AV in the case of Special/General
pairings would be to adhere to the guideline Just as Specific as
Necessary (JASAN):
JASAN: Use Special when it is
appropriate; otherwise, use General.
If you follow JASAN, Special maintains its meaning, and General picks
up some content by implicature. An example: for the choice
between the intensifier
very
and a more specific alternative like
extremely,
following JASAN keeps
extremely
towards the high end of the scale, while
very continues to denote something
up the scale, but now conveys that it's not at the high end.
Prescriptions about usage rarely suggest JASAN; instead, they routinely
advise that AV be satisfied by avoiding General:
ALS: Avoid the Less Specific.
In particular, advice manuals routinely suggest avoiding
very. The consequence of
following ALS is to move Special into the space General used to occupy,
eventually bleaching it (and General as well).
In at least one case, some manuals actually advise
AGAINST
Special: from Strunk (1918) to recent works by Garner, we're told not
to use sentence-initial linking
however,
as in:
The roads were impassible.
However, we at last succeeded in reaching camp.
Garner recommends using
but
instead. (Call this Garner's Rule, GR, since Garner is its most
energetic current expositor. GR, of course, contradicts a widely
touted but quite spurious "rule" No Initial Coordinators (NIC), barring
sentence-initial coordinating conjunctions; see Zwicky 2006a,b.)
These advisers think of this
however
and
but as equivalent in
"meaning", and sense that
however
somehow weakens the effect of the clause that follows. (In what
follows, references to
however
and
but are to these two
items as sentence-initial linking elements, unless otherwise noted.)
But
however and
but aren't equivalent:
but is General, and
however Special, as observed by
Fraser (1998). There are many circumstances (some of which we
survey) where
but is fine but
however is at best odd -- in
protests, for example:
A: It's bedtime.
B: But I haven't had a story yet. / *However, I haven't had a story yet.
In Schiffrin's (1987) terms,
but
marks a main unit in discourse organization, while
however marks a subordinate unit
(and so conveys more about information structure than
but, which merely expresses
contrast).
JASAN would tell us to use
however
wherever appropriate,
but
otherwise, and ALS would tell us to avoid
but. Either way,
but would be disfavored. In
actual usage,
but dwarfs
however, though the frequency of
however is not negligible, and is
even considerable for some practiced writers (we exhibit some
statistics). We suggest that GR might reflect an appreciation of
the discourse subordination of the material that
however introduces, but we're
dubious about GR on two grounds: other sentence-initial discourse
connectives (
consequently,
therefore,
nonetheless,
nevertheless) that no one seems to
complain about, although they are also discourse subordinators; and
sentence-internal uses of
however
("We at last succeeded, however, in reaching camp."), which are also
discourse subordinators, but are often suggested as substitutes for
initial
however. The
other initial adverbials and the internal uses of
however also share with initial
however its prosodic weight and
formality of style, so there seems to be no external justification for
the bias against initial
however,
which remains a matter of individual taste -- perhaps a reaction to the
over-use of initial
however
by student writers who have been taught NIC. In any case, GR runs
against both the Gricean JASAN and the prescriptivists' usual advice,
ALS; there is no good reason not to use sentence-initial linking
however on occasion.
References
Fraser, J. Bruce. 1998. Contrastive discourse markers in
English. Jucker & Ziv 1998:301-26.
Garner, Bryan A. 1998. A dictionary of modern American
usage. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
- 2003. Garner's modern American usage. [2nd ed. of Garner
1998] NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
- 2004. The winning brief: 100 tips for persuasive briefing in
trial and appellate courts. 2nd ed. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
Jucker, Andreas H. & Yael Ziv (ed.). 1998. Discourse
markers: Descriptions and theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers.
Cambridge Univ. Press.
Strunk, William Jr. 1918. The elements of style.
Ithaca NY: W.P. Humphrey. [Available on-line from 1999
here]
Strunk, William Jr. & E.B. White. 2000. The elements of
style. 4th ed. [1st ed. 1959] NY: Longman.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 2006a. If they do it too much, they should be
told not to do it at all. (Language Log 10/31/06:
link)
- 2006b. However,... (Language Log 11/1/06:
link)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 21, 2007 12:42 AM