The Grammatical Status of However

Popular grammar books have long admonished their readers for using conjunctive adverbs as coordinators, and nowhere more than in the case of however. The very force of this prescription suggests that the rule is far from intuitive for many users of standard edited English: examples of however taking on a syntactically coordinating function (equivalent to but) are not difficult to find, nor are they limited to unedited sources. This paper addresses the question of whether prescriptivism is clouding our view of a linguistic change in the grammatical status of however. Drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), we argue that the apparent “confusion” about whether however can serve as a clausal coordinator may be closely related to its increasing preference, over the past century-and-a-half, for clause-initial placement. Descriptive grammars of the last twenty years have labeled select conjunctive adverbs other than however “marginal coordinators.” This paper presents the hypothesis that however is following a historical trajectory similar to the “marginal coordinators” so and yet, whose mixed function is now accepted as standard; and it explores the extent to which shifting patterns in sentence placement preferences—as a result, perhaps, of colloquialization—may be a factor in the changing grammatical function of however