The Research Group in Syntax & Morphology (Research Programme in Language Sciences; School of Communication & Culture; Aarhus University) is pleased to announce the first of two guest lectures by:

Laura Bailey (Univ. of Kent) https://linguistlaura.wordpress.com/ & https://www.kent.ac.uk/cultures-languages/people/1707/bailey-laura,

The syntactic and semantic properties of because-X, because why not?

(Based on work co-authored with Christina S. Kim and Eleanor Cook)

We will take a look at the rapidly-evolving and relatively new phenomenon known as because X, as in I have to collect data because science. We present data from an exploratory survey, a Twitter corpus, and a large-scale acceptability rating and fill-in-the-blank study, and we will demonstrate that because X is sensitive to syntactic category (interjections and bare nouns are favoured, while prepositional phrases and verbs are rarely permitted), and that there is an effect of internet usage and variety of English. Furthermore, because X is not elliptical, as is often suggested. Based on these studies, we show that there are two subtypes of because-X, one with a deictic function indicating a state of affairs, and one with an expressive function conveying an emotional state. Both rely heavily on the addressee's contextual knowledge or salient properties of X, leading to a high degree of flexibility of the interpretation of X and restricted contexts of use in terms of audience (in-groups) and register (informal, especially online communities).