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Article published In: Today’s Innovations, Tomorrow’s Conventions: Usage-based approaches to incipient developments in English
Edited by David Lorenz and David Tizón-Couto
[Functions of Language 32:1] 2025
► pp. 74–104

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Discourse markers in the making

Just so you know and it just so happens

 | University of Graz
 | University of Graz
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Graz.

Published online: 4 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.23016.kal
Abstract
This paper identifies just so you know and it just so happens as emerging discourse markers in American English, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Both discourse markers started to appear around the middle of the 20th century but differ in their discourse functions and development. Just so you know is used for cancelling implicatures, expressing emphasis, indicating topic shift or specifying a preceding utterance. (It) just so happens, on the other hand, signals an unexpected, yet relevant piece of information. In terms of their development, only just so you know has so far managed to gain a firm foothold in terms of frequency, exhibiting also a high degree of productivity in the form of a whole family of related discourse marker uses (e.g. just so you understand, just so we’re clear). Both discourse markers are identified as resulting from cooptation, but with different degrees of subsequent grammaticalization. The less successful development of (it) just so happens is attributed to the prior existence of a functional competitor, viz. as it happens, and possibly its different source construction, viz. a matrix rather than an adverbial clause.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The rise of discourse markers: Origins and proposed processes of change
  • 3.Just so you know
    • 3.1Discourse functions
    • 3.2A family of related discourse markers
    • 3.3Development
  • 4.(It) just so happens
    • 4.1Discourse functions
    • 4.2Development
  • 5.Conspectus
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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