the temporal subordinator "since"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

one of my students, doug kenter, is working on the choice between the
subordinators "since" and "because" as markers of logical connection
(reason or cause).  what a great many stylebooks insist on is that
"since" is not to be used that way -- it is acceptable only in its
original sense as a marker of temporal connection -- and must
(almost) always be replaced by "because".  this is, of course, silly;
logical "since" has been around since the 15th century, and is easy
to find in "good writing".

the proscription against logical "since" (and "while") is usually
justified on the basis of ambiguity avoidance, but this is also
silly: as many people have pointed out, it's extremely hard to find
an example where, *in context*, there is any serious doubt about
which of the two uses of "since" was intended.  with some work, you
can concoct such example, but in real life the issue virtually never
arises, so the proscription avoids a largely non-existent problem.

actually, we've been realizing over the past week, real-life examples
of *temporal* "since" are pretty thin on the ground, once you exclude:
   (a) the preposition "since" ("since the beginning of the
century"), which is always temporal;
   (b) occurrences of "ever since" ("ever since the century began"),
which are also always temporal;
   (c) occurrences of "since" with time-measure expressions ("It's
been six weeks since we've seen a movie"), where it is, once again,
always temporal.

there are probably more such restricted environments.

(note, by the way, that "ever since" is another place where "ever"
occurs with a universal reading.  here i refer back to a thread from
a little while ago (12-15 september) on universal "ever".)

it begins to look like, while usage advisers are trying to stamp out
logical "since" (and preserve temporal "since"), the users of the
language are moving in the opposite direction, by giving up temporal
"since" (and preserving logical "since"), except in a few special
contexts.  putting the idea another way, it begins to look like
"since" is now primarily a logical subordinator, with some special
temporal uses.  (indeed, there are some contexts where logical
"since" is hugely preferable to "because" -- in speech-act
adverbials, for example, as in "Since/??Because you asked me, I'm
trying to grow a beard.")

we still need to find out whether there is now this disparity between
logical and temporal "since".  meanwhile, we know nothing about the
history of the temporal subordinator "since".  it's possible that the
first question has already been answered in the literature (the
Longman Grammar has data, discussed on p. 848, that suggest different
usages in different genres, with temporal "since" dominating logical
"since" in all genres except academic writing and (to a lesser
degree) fiction, but its counts include examples of types (b) and (c)
above, so it's hard to know how to interpret them).  if the first
question hasn't been answered, or if the answer is in the negative,
then probably no one has thought to look at frequencies of different
uses over time.

all very speculative at this point, and we could be wrong.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org