Noncompositional

A recent story on CNN’s The Turnaround, a show about business owners trying to take their businesses to the next level, featured an LA area caterer who lost her sisters and mother to sickness and now is devoted to charity work. One particular line in the narration caught my ear:

She devotes much of her time to charity - not outside her work hours, but during them - because Emma often caters to those who can’t pay full price.

This is a sort of metalinguistic use of because, though not one that I was used to. I’m used to various words that indicate cause and conditionality used metalinguistically in cases like these:

• There’s leftover pizza in the fridge if you’re hungry.
• There’s a new Chinese place down the corner, unless you’re in more of an Italian mood.

(Not to mention the well-known epistemic modals seen in utterances like Since his backback is still here, John must still be around.) These metalinguistic uses intrigue me. One way of talking about these guys that I’ve heard of is to say that they are elements in a speech act construction. That is, you have a speech act construction whose semantics part is something like a “statement” scenario (”frame,” if you like), with participants including Speaker, Content, Reason, Purpose, and so on. This construction binds the Speaker with the actual physical speaker, and the Content with the informational content of the utterance. The construction can also take constituents that express various other “roles” in the “making a statement frame.” The effect is that in a sentence like If you’re hungry, there’s beer in the fridge, you’re saying “in the case that you are hungry then I say to you that….” Same with the epistemic modals: “Because the backpack is still here I have reason to say to you that…”

But these are definitely more speech-acty than the line in the CNN show. Instead of using a statement of suggest or request something, the CNN anchor is merely giving information. He uses because in this case to mean something like What I say is true because…. Note the utter failure that results from inverting the clauses: ???Because Emma often caters to those who can’t pay full price, she devotes much of her time to charity…. Ka-boom, went the sentence.

Other fun sentences of a similar ilk:

• As a professional chef, that meal was absolutely horribly done.
• Since you’re here, where’s the best place to buy picture frames?