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Article published In: Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. Jucker
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 164–179

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The rise of a concessive “category reassessment” construction

But fear all the same

 | Stanford University
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00051.tra
Abstract
In the Late Modern English period, several expressions arose with concessive ‘despite what might be expected’ meaning, among them anyway, nonetheless and all the same (Lenker, Ursula. 2010. Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The topic of this paper is the rise of the specialized concessive construction “but (be) X all the same”. In the full rhetorical formula of which it is a part, X is initially represented as not having properties Y but nevertheless as having sufficient other relevant properties to be classified as X, as in “…fear. It is not the eye-rolling, quaking fear seen in police states, but it is fear all the same” (1963 coha). Here the writer concedes that there is fear despite Y (see Horn, Laurence R. 1991. “Given as New: When Redundant Affirmation Isn’t”. Journal of Pragmatics 15 (4): 313–336. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar on “redundant information”) and invites the addressee to reinterpret the initial X retrospectively (see Haselow, Alexander. 2013. “Arguing for a Wide Conception of Grammar: The Case of Final Particles in Spoken Discourse”. Folia Linguistica 47 (2): 375–424. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar on functions of “final particles”). Using data mainly from clmet3.0 and coha, I discuss the conventionalization of this construction in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar and argue alongside, for example, Goldberg, Adele E. 2004. “Pragmatics and Argument Structure”. In Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 538–561. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Cappelle, Bert. 2017. “What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions?” In Ilse Depraetere and Raphael Salkie (eds), Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, 115–151. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Finkbeiner, Rita. 2019. “Reflections on the Role of Pragmatics in Construction Grammar”. In Rita Finkbeiner (ed), On the Role of Pragmatics in Construction Grammar, special issue of Constructions and Frames 11 (2): 171–192. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar that pragmatics should be given a larger role in construction grammar than has often been the case in the past.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.A brief outline of the rise of the concessive connective marker all the same
  • 4.Phrasal adjunct use of all the same in “but (be) X all the same”
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1From a pragmatic perspective
    • 5.2From a constructional perspective
    • 5.3From a Diachronic Construction Grammar perspective
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
References (46)
Corpora
Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller and Jukka Tyrkköclmet 3.0. The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, 1710–1920, version 3.0 (clmet3.0) compiled by Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller and Jukka Tyrkkö. Leuven University. See: [URL]
Mark Daviescoca Corpus of Contemporary American English. 1990–2019. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. Release March 2020. See: [URL]
Mark Daviescoha Corpus of Historical American English. 1820–2019. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. Release 2021. See: [URL]
eebo Early English Books Online. 1470s to 1690s. Corpus created as part of the Text Creation Partnership. See: [URL]
oed Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See: [URL]
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Serrano-Losada, Mario
2025.  Elizabeth Closs Traugott , Ten lectures on a diachronic constructionalist approach to Discourse Structuring Markers (Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics 27). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022. Pp. xiv + 214. ISBN 9789004506909.. English Language and Linguistics 29:2 ► pp. 411 ff. DOI logo
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2023. “But I Hate Him Just the Same”: On the Rise of Concessive Markers with Same. Journal of English Linguistics 51:4 ► pp. 311 ff. DOI logo

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