3 ms·

There’s a character in the Aubrey-Maturin series who uses this construction often. I always wondered if it was an idiosyncrasy, a regionalism, or an archaic usa

• atombender 3y ago
  Fun to see the Aubrey-Maturin series mentioned here; that was indeed the first thing I thought of. Killick's use of "which" always struck me as odd. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same grammatic construct as the one in the article. Here [1] is a discussion about it. The top answer argues it's just a meaningless discourse marker. It was also covered in Mark Liberman's Language Log [2]. Apparently the conjunctive "which" is increasing in usage as a discourse marker [3]. [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245363/what-is-the-name-of-the-grammatical-device-where-18th-and-19th-century-sentences https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245363/what-is-t... [2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.h... [3] http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/which-discourse-marker http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/which-discourse-marker