MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One beautiful thing about language is that it is constantly changing. Thanks to the Internet, change can be brought around quickly in language fads. One of these current language changes is centered around “because”, where “because” is followed by a noun phrase which stands in as a substitution of a sum or thoughts, a witty reply, or a verbal shrug. With this new use a reply to a question could simply be, “Because, reasons,” a summation of a complex, more complete thought. Modeled similarly to Jack Handley’s Saturday Night Live “because, hey” jokes, this construction has become widely popular through Internet memes starting in 2011 and has become so frequent that “because” was named the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2013. Tentative names for this have been “prepositional because” and “because NOUN”, however both of these titles don’t capture the scope and uniqueness of how “because” is being used. I indicate in this paper that the because x construction allows “because” to be followed by a noun phrase, adjective phrase, or even exclamation. This paper compares the because x construction to the traditional uses of “because” as a subordinating conjunction or a compound preposition and explores this new construction as a potential ellipsis or preposition through a syntactic analysis. I conclude with the analysis that subordinating conjunctions as a class are shifting to appear with interjectionary complements, which creates the because x construction. Of course, this analysis could also be incorrect as because x is used more frequently by a broader range of users because, creativity. Because, language change.