3 ms·

See also another relatively recent grammatical innovation in English, the evolution of "slash" into a conjunction: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013

See also another relatively recent grammatical innovation in English, the evolution of "slash" into a conjunction: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not-just-a-punctuation-mark-anymore/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not... (Someone elsewhere in the thread said the "because" construction was unusual because prepositions evolve more slowly than words of other parts of speech in English; this is true, but conjunctions typically move slowest of all. Such times we live in...)

bglazer 13y ago
Ah that's really cool to see a relatively rare phenomenon like that happening in real time. Also fascinating that the author used Facebook feeds as a source. That seems like it could be a very, very powerful tool for linguistics. The privacy issues are obvious, but imagine being able to trace the spread of new language construction as it propagates through a population.