How is language evolve on the internet ? In this series on internet linguistics , Gretchen McCullochbreaks down the latest innovation in on-line communicating .
Sometimes a conviction does n’t cease where you ’d have a bun in the oven , but . And yet somehow , you still know what the writer intended , so . This may be something you do all the sentence , or .
( I could go on like this , but . )
Here are a few more examples :
" What if I had a tumblr that was just pictures of toes , would you guys follow that or . "
" I ’d endeavor to translate what all these technical term intend , but . "
" The breeze ? Well , it ’s raining , so . "
And it ’s not just watchword , it ’s also punctuation . Here are a few incomplete sentences ending with a Polygonia comma thatI foundontumblr :
" You wear that a great deal . " " Yes , that is because I , the proud possessor of a washing machine , "
" If tumblr is so accepting , why is it that I , a brony , "
What ’s kick the bucket on here ?
The common factor in all of these example is that while they seem to terminate abruptly , with a subordinator or comma that we ’d have a bun in the oven to introduce another clause , the author ’s purpose is still very clear . So clear , in fact , that to continue and write a complete prison term would just belabour the point .
This set is n’t even the first subordinator to be re - purposed for the determination of stop a prison term incompletely — thoughstarted out life only used at the beginning of set phrase ( " though I like cats , I prefer dogs " ) , just likealthoughstill is . But over the past two centuries , though(but notalthough ) has become every bit acceptable at the end , where it has a slightly dissimilar meaning ( " I wish cats though " — you would n’t say " I care cats although " ) .
Here ’s a graphical record that I made from theCorpus of Historical American English . Each of these decade has about the same numeral of totalthoughs , but the proportion that are rule before a period has increase .
The same cash in one’s chips for punctuation . Of the two conduce uncomplete - sentence punctuation mark mark , ellipsis and dash , neither start out being used for the use . The older use of ellipsis is to indicate omitted text edition in a quote — the use of eclipsis to drop behind off is newer . Similarly , elder dah join clauses within a sentence , while newer dashes can be used for talks that have interrupted .
So we ’ve always had uncompleted conviction , from truncated news headlines and received trail - offs like " well … " or " but yeah " to more recent innovations like " because x " ( because reasons , because yay ) and " I ca n’t even" . Though , eclipsis , dash , and so on do n’t have the accurate feeling conveyed by net hangingbut , or , so , or comma butterfly , so perhaps we were lack appropriate words and punctuation to indicate " this is so obvious I ’m not even going to finish the sentence . "
Where do trailingbut , or , so , and comma butterfly come from?Some linguists think thatfinal hangingbutmight be concern to Japanese , where the particlekedodoes the same thing , but that does n’t explain the other three . It could be the influence of lecture on informal writing — language contains more fragment than courtly writing , so as we write more conversationally in texts and societal media , perhaps we ’re look for the flexibleness of more incomplete sentences .
But regardless of the crusade , it ’s not just that we ’re randomly forgetting to eat up our sentences . Sometimes , some subordinators still vocalise passably terrible at the end of a sherd by anyone ’s standards :
- particularly the ones that involve to appear in pairs , if.*More research is clearly necessary to figure out , when .
Part of a new series oninternet linguistics .
