A snapshot of the emerging because-X construction

This article gives a description of the emerging construction known as because-X (We have to collect data because science). Using a Twitter corpus and an acceptability rating study with a large number of participants, we char- acterise the element X as being sensitive to syntactic category (interjections and bare nouns are favoured, while prepositional phrases and verbs are rarely permitted) and as being syntactically inflexible, unlike the clause or phrasal complement of because-clause or because-of. Furthermore, we show that there are two subtypes of because-X, one with a deictic function indicating a state of affairs, and one with an expressive function conveying an emotional state. Both rely heavily on the addressee’s contextual knowledge or salient properties of X, leading to a high degree of flexibility of the interpretation of X and re- stricted contexts of use in terms of audience (in-groups) and register (informal, especially online communities).