For as long as I've been writing this blog, I've used conjunctions to begin sentences. And none of the copyeditors who visit TYWKIWDBI have reprimanded me for doing so. But I still wondered if it was o.k. So today I'm posting this excerpt from
Language Log. After confirming the well-documented Biblical propensity for initial conjunctions, Mark Liberman examined the writings of the United States Supreme Court (graph above) -
I grouped these files into five-year periods from 1801 to 2005 (e.g. 1801-1805, 1806-1810, etc.), and counted the frequency of sentence-initial and and but in each time-slice... (Of course, the number of authors per year is much lower, and stylistic variation among individual justices and clerks is a plausible source of year-to-year variation.)... After two centuries of apparent decline, the use of sentence-initial coordinators seems to have been rebounding a bit recently... One thing is clear, though. For the past two centuries the U.S. Supreme Court has been using sentence-initial and at rates substantially higher than those found in COCA's "academic" section...
And now on to something completely different...
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