And But So v. and but so

In our very productive discussion of Quest's grammar rules for coordinating conjunctions on Tuesday and Wednesday, there was, not surprisingly, some initial disagreement as to whether or not those rules as given on page 29 (Hartmann, 2007) were entirely correct.

And when we have a disagreement, good academics resort not to weapons or threats of violence, such as imprisonment, to win arguments, nor to laws and authority (Because I'm the teacher and I say so!) to silence disagreement and disliked opinions. No, we look for supporting reasons for and against the opposing sides. This is why, after asserting that Hartmann herself does not follow the rules set out on page 29, I quickly skimmed the first readings in chapter 1 for examples of sentences beginning with a coordinating conjunction. I failed.

But at leisure later, I continued my search for evidence in Quest, and found an example on page 108, where Hartmann's reading has a sentence beginning with And.  Continuing my quest for support that Hartmann's stated grammar rules on page 29 are not entirely correct, I also quickly skimmed a chapter from a book by a famous Harvard University professor and very literate native English speaker: in "Do We Own Ourselves? Libertarianism", chapter 3 of his book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel has at least one sentence on almost every page starting with And, But or So. Sandel seems especially fond of putting full stops in front of but. Similarly, in his papers published in academic journals, Robert Nozick, one of the great philosophers of the last fifty years, is fond of starting his sentences with coordinating conjunctions; for example, on one page alone of his essay "Socratic Puzzles", Nozick starts sentences with And, But and So (1997, p. 147).

And this is where I remembered the cool tool I mentioned in an earlier post - Google's Ngram Viewer. I clicked that tool on our blog, entered the search term "But,but,And,and,So,so" and searched: the results are most illuminating. First, the history of English sentences starting with And, But and So does back much farther than I had thought. It isn't recent, but was already occurring two-hundred years ago, at about the same, or slightly higher, relative frequency as today. Of course, the large source that Google uses includes far more than academic writing, so perhaps the frequency was much lower then than it is today for these capitalized coordinating conjunctions, but in either case, all those old traditional grammars of English that said you can't do it were certainly not very accurate in their reporting of the grammar of the last couple of hundred years in English. But the Ngram viewer also tells us something else, consistent with Wann's comment in class that she had never seen such uses: and is about ten times more common than And, although but is only about five times more common than But, and so looks to be about five times as common as So. Clearly, these conjunctions are not normally found at the start of a sentence, but between two independent clauses that make up one compound sentence.

Nonetheless, English clearly has a long history of the grammar of coordinating conjunctions that contradicts what the grammar books have always said was "correct" until recently, although even Swan (2005, § 510.2) doesn't seem very keen on such uses. I think it's time he updated his very popular reference grammar, which I still recommend, for students of English as a second language.

Finally, a question to think about and comment on: what do you think might be a useful rule to guide us in our use of starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions? A little more generally, when is it OK to break the rules (any of them) of traditional grammar? Clearly, native speakers are breaking the grammar "rules" all the time: if they were not, the language would never change! We would still be speaking as Shakespeare did - and he was a great grammar rule breaker.

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References

Google Ngram Viewer [But,but,And,and,So,so]. (2014, March 13). Retrieved from https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=But%2C+but%2C+And%2C+and%2C+So%2C+so&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CBut%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbut%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CAnd%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cand%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSo%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cso%3B%2Cc0

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Nozick, R. (1997). Socratic Puzzles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sandel, M. (2009). Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (Kindle edition). London: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Swan, M. (2005). Practical English Usage (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.