2020 Volume 23 Issue 1 Pages 210-225
The use of sentence-initial But (SIB) as a coordinating conjunction as opposed to its intrasentential counterpart is disfavored from a prescriptive viewpoint, especially in written text. Its use in practice, however, makes frequent appearances in relatively formal texts such as newspapers, dictionaries, academic papers, and language textbooks. This study examines, from a sociolinguistic point of view, whether the variation between SIB and intrasentential but is stable or is language change in progress. A survey of dictionaries and grammar books implies that the use of SIB is not a recent development, and that it has been stable at least since the 18th century. Quantitative analysis of recent use of SIB in a diachronic corpus of American English (COHA) reveals that 20–30% of use of but as a coordinating conjunction is as SIB. The relatively slow increase in the frequency of SIB in the 200 years between the 1810s and the 2000s shows that SIB can be seen as language change in progress. The change implies that the coordinating conjunction but is in the process of becoming acceptable as a linking adverbial in that it appears in a sentence-initial position.
