Language Log

Nevertheless Hardy, however

Could it be true? Did English connective adverbs really break loose from their clause-initial moorings around 1890, and float into fashionably (post-)subjective space? Did this drift so impress Willie Strunk's youthful sensibility that he codified it as a rule of grammar? For those of you who've been on the edge of your seats since we revealed the shocking truth about Henry James' placement of nevertheless, here's another postcard from the bleeding edge of stylometry.

Thomas Hardy's novels and stories offer us a total of 2,348,934 words, published between 1871 and 1895. Across all these works, nevertheless occurs clause-initially 60 times and medially 68 times (47% initial), while however (as a connective adverb) occurs 381 times clause-initially and 436 times medially (also 47% initial!).

So the first and clearest message is that Hardy treats both of these connective adverbs in about the same way, at least as far as clause-initial proportion is concerned. (The non-initial instances of these two words have different distributions, but that's another story -- see below.) Although Hardy must have been among the authors who formed William Strunk's sense of English prose style, there is no evidence in Hardy's works, treated as a whole, to support Strunk's notorious anxiety about initial placement of however.

However, if we inspect the beginning and end of Hardy's career separately, a slightly different pattern emerges. The table below breaks things out for his first four and last four prose works separately:

By the end of Hardy's career as a novelist, his proportion of clause-initial however has declined from 60% to 44%. This is a 28% relative decline (a drop of 16.6% relative to 60.1%). While not nearly so spectacular as the change in Henry James' treatment of nevertheless, which dropped from 43% clause-initial to 4% clause-initial between the first and second half of his novelistic career, it provides a little bit of additional support for the view that something was happening to English connective adverbs during the Gay Nineties.

On the other hand, Hardy's pattern for nevertheless goes in the opposite direction, from 38% initial to 50% initial. The counts are small, and the change in proportion is not enormous, but this may reflect a gradual change away from the original phrasal interpretation "never the less", which often occurs at the ends of clauses (these examples from A Pair of Blue Eyes):

But he was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour nevertheless.

and towards a less compositional interpretation as a simple connective adverb, which tends to occur at or near clause beginnings.

As for the trend in however placement, could it be the result of authorial maturity, not the Gay Nineties after all? Perhaps after you publish a million words or so, some of your adverbs start floating. On the basis of the evidence so far, we can't distinguish the internal clock of individual stylistic evolution from the external clock of stylistic fashion. Stay tuned for more.