Noncompositional

Yet another installment in the series where I observe grammar letting people talk about what they’re talking about.

Last week (or so) on a show on the Food Network about how people make it in the food industry/service world, a coffeeshop owner was being interviewed on how he got his business started. He said, paraphrasing,

I didn’t originally want a coffee shop. What I really wanted was to have a place that sold really nice, gourmet sandwiches and salads that by the way had great coffee.

I can’t recall exactly the prosody on the by the way, but it didn’t have so-called “comma intonation” - that is, it wasn’t marked off from the rest of the sentence with a pause and a compression of frequency. There might have been some prosodic setting-off, including some extra umph on the “way.” In any case, even though the guy is not quoting any particular person, directly or indirectly, he inserts a discourse marker like “by the way” to evoke the idea that this was how people would be talking about his store. Or, perhaps he’s done yet another leap and quasi-un-grammaticalized the marker “by the way” to mean ‘as a minor/side point.’ (I don’t know what to call the change of discourse marker > semantic-ful adverbial)

Next, consider again.

And who did Barack run against again? That’s right, a total nutcase.

A more familiar example might be What was your name again? or Where are we going again? In the most basic sense, you’re adding “again” to mark ‘I’m asking you this again.’ I view it as a sort of politeness marker: intuitively, you’re acknowledging the fact that you didn’t get/understand/hear the answer the first time; or another view is (though I generally dislike using Brown/Levinson terminology) that it is form of “negative politeness” that mitigates the (negative-)face-threatening act of asking a question twice (come on, isn’t that obvious? no, actually, I’m not sure if B and L’s framework could, or would want to, handle something like again).

Interesting things to note: (1) you didn’t really have to have asked the question before. Politeness is achieved by evoking the idea that one has, or should have, asked the question before. This is similar to What was your name?, said to someone sitting next to you on an airplane and with whom you’ve been having an extended chat. The past tense “was” references that time when you should have properly introduced yourselves. (2) You can’t, as I discovered with much hilarity, use yet again as a super-politeness marker for when you’ve asked the question twice before (or even more funnily, when you’ve asked it twice before and the second time you used “again” as a politeness marker — though wouldn’t it be amazing if English did that?). (3) Also note that this is conventionally not associated with polarity questions: ??Are you going to buy the tickets for both of us, again? I suppose it would work, though a rather different prosody is necessary, I think. (4) And it can’t go sentence-initially; or, if it does, it is rather adversarial: Again, who were you with on that night? It can, however, also go after the wh-word, but not anywhere else in the middle of the sentence. (5) And it doesn’t work with embedded questions (I think) and declarations (except with the adversarial meaning).