But: Where does yours go?

If you're an Aussie, at the end of course

Some Australians. Not the human kind, but. Photo by David Clode on Unsplash.

One thing about Australians, they sure take their grammar seriously. Some time in the past, some meddler decreed that one must never start a sentence with a conjunction. The Aussies, bless their sun-scorched socks, took that to heart and, in the interests of safety, began plonking but at the end of every second sentence.

I was delighted to learn that linguists have given this phenomenon a name - in a 2008 paper Australian Jean Mulder and her American colleague Sandra Thompson called it “but as a final particle”.

When linguists say particle, they mean a function word that has little lexical meaning but can add context to a sentence or express the speaker’s mood.

Function words are distinct from content words like zebra, zippy and zigzag. One way you can tell a content word from a function word is by going to the dictionary. If you find a clear definition for it, it’s a content word. If the dictionary describes the way it’s used, rather than its meaning, it’s probably a function word.

Particles are just one type of function word. Others include prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and grammatical articles like a and the and.

The way Aussies use but as a final particle is distinct from how the rest of the world does it. We use a final but to indicate an unspoken counterstatement; what Mulder and Thompson call an “utterance … having been finished, but with an implication left hanging”, as in, “I like her, but…”. While the speaker may have finished speaking, they’re also inviting the listener to complete the sentence.

In this context, but is acting as a conjunction, a word that connects two thoughts or clauses.

What’s unique to Aussies is their use of but as a substitute for though, and as an adverb, not a conjunction (despite my earlier, misleading assertion). When they do this, there’s no unspoken implication; they’re done talking and that’s that.

Allow me to illustrate with an example. Many years ago on a family holiday at the peak of the Australian summer - a foolhardy venture that I don’t recommend to anyone with sweat glands - we stopped for gas in the outback town of Hay. As I stepped out of the air-conditioned vehicle, I was assaulted by a wall of 40-something degree heat (Celsius, that is, my American friends).

“Holy moly,” I said to the owner, “this heat’s something, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” he replied. “She can get up to 50 around here, easy.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “How do you stand it?”

“It is a bit warm,” he agreed, in that rural Australian drawl. After a moment’s thought, he then wistfully added, “It’s a dry heat, but.”

I love that story more than I can tell you. Not only does it capture something wonderfully laconic about Australian speech, it also captures something special about the Australian psyche. Who else but an Aussie could wave away life-threatening heat as a non-event because at least it’s not humid? They’re the same people who, if they have an arm taken off by a shark and are asked later if it hurt, will reply, “Yeah, it did a bit.” Or will inform the lost and weary traveler, without a hint of sarcasm, that the next town 500 kilometres distant, is “just down the road.”

If it takes your arm off, you’ll probably die. If it bites an Aussie, it’ll hurt a bit.

You may be thinking that but as a final particle, while charming, is surely also a little rustic if not downright backward. Not so fast. Mulder and Thompson’s 2008 paper was titled The Grammaticization of but as a Final Particle in English Conversation, where grammaticization names a word’s (or a morpheme’s) elevation to a more grammatical status.

One example is the word ille in Latin, which was used like that in English (for example, that man) and was never obligatory. French turned it into le and la, and made it obligatory before a noun phrase.

So Mulder and Thompson were saying that while but as a final particle may look anarchic, in fact it’s become bound by grammatical rules like the subject-verb agreement rule you’ll find in high-minded textbooks. If you want a fancy name for this, you can say that as a word becomes grammaticized, it becomes syntagmatically constrained - which means the range of possible ways it can be used with other words and parts of speech becomes smaller.

This is not unusual. Interjected words like abso-fuckin-lutely, which is about as informal as speech gets, are constrained by a rule that says the interjection must always come before a stressed vowel. You won’t find that rule in Fowler or Strunk & White, but that doesn’t lessen its force one iota. (Try saying ab-fuckin-solutely and you’ll get the point.)

Such unwritten rules were long overlooked by those who believed you either obeyed the rules of “correct” English or were an ignorant peasant incapable of expressing all but the simplest thoughts. In fact, non-standard variants of English - think local dialects, creole languages, and the language spoken by many Black Americans - are every bit as rule-bound, complex and capable of expressing subtle thoughts as standard English.

I’d also say that when a usage attracts a paper from two reputable linguists, and that paper has grammaticization in its title, that usage surely warrants a little respect. If you want more reason to withhold judgement, consider that Mulder and Thompson posit that ‘final but’ may be following a grammaticization process similar to the one that though took in the past - a pathway that allows anyone, Australian or not, to pop though at the end of a sentence when needed.

Why Australians use but as a final particle is an interesting question. Another Australian linguist, Pamela Peters, suggests it may soften the impact on the listener. I think it may have something to do with the Australian (and New Zealand) habit of clipping speech as much as possible, perhaps as an act of defiance towards our early colonial - and tiresomely verbose - masters.

Unlike Mulder, Thompson and Peters, I have no evidence to support my view, but.

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Bits and specious

The gas station owner was probably stretching the truth a bit. According to Wikipedia, the highest temperature ever recorded in Hay was 47.7 degrees, on 5 January 2013.

The stowaway action sequence of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was filmed in Hay.

You can find the Mulder and Thompson paper here.

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Quote of the week

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet. She’s now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
Dame Edna Everage