The "gay nineties": dial telephones, practical electric power, subways, basketball. Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The coronation of Russia's last Czar. Philadelphia's new city hall was the tallest building in the world. And something happened to adverbs.
Well, something happened to nevertheless, anyhow. At least in the writing of Henry James.
In modern writing, the connective adverb nevertheless occurs mostly in clause-initial position: in a sample of newspaper stories from Google News, 23 clause initial vs. 13 non-initial (64%); in a sample of blog writing from technorati.com, 27 clause-initial vs. 15 non-initial (64%); in a sample of MEDLINE abstracts, 28 clause-initial vs. 8 non-initial (78%). Like other adverbial words and phrases, nevertheless floats around under the joint influence of meaning, syntax and style, but it usually washes up at the start of a clause.
I looked into the placement of nevertheless and some other connective adverbs in order to compare them with however, a word that had the bad luck to attract William Strunk's attention in the early years of the 20th century (see posts here and here for the backstory). Since Strunk said nothing about nevertheless, I figured it would give a useful point of comparison. Among the other texts I checked were some of the novels of Henry James
In the end, I left the other adverbs out of my post on Strunkish however dogma. But looking over the figures I had jotted down on a napkin, I noticed an odd pattern in James' use of nevertheless:
Work |
Date |
initial |
non-initial |
percent initial |
| Watch and Ward | 1871 | 5 |
8 |
|
| The Europeans | 1878 | 3 |
5 |
|
| Daisy Miller | 1879 | 2 |
3 |
|
| Washington Square | 1881 | 7 |
4 |
|
| Portrait of a Lady | 1881 | 13 |
23 |
|
| The Bostonians | 1886 | 7 |
7 |
|
| All works checked | 1871-1886 | 37 |
50 |
43% |
| What Maisie Knew | 1897 | 0 |
8 |
|
| The Sacred Fount | 1901 | 1 |
7 |
|
| The Wings of the Dove | 1902 | 0 |
19 |
|
| The Ambassadors | 1903 | 1 |
14 |
|
| In the Cage | 1908 | 0 |
5 |
|
| The Reverberator | 1908 | 1 |
5 |
|
| The Golden Bowl | 1909 | 0 |
15 |
|
| All works checked | 1897-1909 | 3 |
73 |
4% |
Even in his early work, James tends to use clause-initial nevertheless less often than the modern norm, but in the second half of his career, the proportion plummets almost to nothing. What happened?
The decade-long gap between The Bostonians and What Maisie Knew is partly due to the limited availability of digital texts for James' novels at the Victorian Literary Studies "hyper-concordance" site, but it also reflects a period (1889-1895) during which James tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a playwright. But I don't see why trying to write plays should affect his adverb placement in novels.
Although James was born in the U.S. and ended his life in London, I don't think the change was the result of assimilation to British norms, because he took up permanent residence in London in 1876, well before Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians.
Was this a stylistic evolution peculiar to James -- interior adverbs for interior monologue? Or does it reflect some larger linguistic (or at least literary) shift in adverbial fashion, reflected in the statistics for however that Geoff Pullum cites from the period 1897-1903, and implicated in the psychodynamics of Strunk's anxiety about that innocent word?
I agree with Geoff that the glottopsychiatry of William Strunk's usage prejudices is of limited interest (though there's some relevance to the anthropology of religious systems, just as we might learn something from delving into the reasons why Adii Ibn Mustafa prohibited eating lettuce, urinating while standing, and wearing dark blue). The nature, source and meaning of a stylistic difference between early and late Henry James will likewise be of interest mainly to specialists. But if there was really a large-scale change in adverb-placement fashions at the end of the 19th century, that would be a phenomenon worthy of serious study, as an especially accessible example of a certain kind of language change. A great deal of text of all types from that period is available (including a fair amount in digital form). And adverb placement (especially for connective adverbs) is relatively easy to study by automatic or semi-automatic means.
Posted by Mark Liberman at February 22, 2005 07:20 AM