AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

Abstract

This article identifiesjust soas a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from theCorpus of Contemporary American Englishand theCorpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day.Just sois shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning wins out over the conditional meaning, thus filling the niche of an informal purpose subordinator and providing an alternative to its multifunctional and semantically ambiguous competitorsso thatandso. With increasing grammaticalization thejust sopurpose subordinator also exhibits signs of intersubjectification, being coopted for syntactically independent, interpersonal uses (e.g.just so we're clear) and culminating in the emergence of a new discourse marker in the form ofjust so you knowin the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To account for the emergence of purposejust so, a constructional network approach is adopted, which considers the network links to other purpose subordinators, notablyso thatandso.