“Impertinent” by sentences in American writing: A cognitive motivation

Abstract

Data drawn from school writing support the conclusion that Americans are reorganizing their intellectual concepts of causality to accommodate the concept that generic situations or circumstantial processes are causal agents, more so than human individuals or groups. This study uses an ethnographic methodology to describe the “impertinent” by, a construction that writers are importing increasingly often into the academic register from spoken American English. Some new work in mental space theory on grammatical blending elucidates the syntactic operation at work in the data. While the construction is not yet generally acceptable in edited written English, the frequency of its occurrence constitutes a change in writers’ linguistic behavior. The data and their analysis offer a look at some of the mechanisms and processes behind a linguistic change in progress, and illustrate the nature of the connection between a language and its users’ conceptual system.