Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 August 14

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August 14

Order: However

What's the difference between:

However, John didn't ...

and

John, however, didn't ...

? When should each one be used?

Or,

Unfortunately, John couldn't ...

and

John, unfortunately, couldn't ...

--Llaanngg (talk) 03:50, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

There is no major difference in meaning between these options; you can use either in these cases and you will be understood. However (!), if you are an advanced learner, then there are a couple of patterns that you might want to pay attention to:

• Leedham & Cai studied how however is used in good student writing at British universities. They found that students educated in English-speaking countries used it at the start of the sentence 65% of the time, but Chinese students used it at the start of the sentence 88% of the time. So you may gain some cultural capital by making sure that you use the word in different places in different written sentences. Reference: Leedham, M and Cai, G. (2013) ‘Besides … on the other hand: Using a corpus approach to explore the influence of teaching materials on Chinese students’ use of linking adverbials’, Journal of Second Language Writing, 22, pp.374-389.
• Some work in Systemic Functional Linguistics has identified a difference in spoken English when however is used as a discourse marker (so it isn't just a link between two sentences, but is used as a 'signpost' to indicate a new direction in the conversation). If you want to finish speaking about a digression (a less important topic) and move onto a more important topic, you can use however at the start of the final sentence of the digression. I don't have the key texts on this (mainly by Michael Halliday and J.R. Martin) with me now, so I am relying on the Google Books snippets of Lenk's study.

Unfortunately (!), I've not come across any research about unfortunately. Matt's talk 05:57, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Llaanngg -- at a more general level, such "sentence adverbs" or "discourse conjunctions" don't modify any single word in a clause, but rather modify the clause as a whole, so it's not too unexpected that some freedom of word order is permitted... AnonMoos (talk) 06:04, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

In a compendium of quotes from different sources use of the word "however" at the beginning of one of them can lead to a belief that an argument is being developed. A spectacular example of this is the false reconstruction of the Roman Republican calendar in our article which became self - contradictory on 30 January 2005. See the discussion at Talk:Mercedonius#Length of Mercedonius. 79.67.91.37 (talk) 14:24, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps relevant is a comment of mine in an old ref-desk thread:

There's an old "rule" that however (=nevertheless) should not be used at the beginning of a sentence, to avoid confusion with conjunctive however (despite the difference in punctuation). I think this may be traceable to Strunk & White, who wrote: "Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is nevertheless. The word usually seves better when not in the first position. ... When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent." They recommend changing "The roads were almost impassable. However, we at last succeeded in reaching camp" to "The roads were almost impassable. At last, however, we succeeded in reaching camp". Of course, most folk, before and since, have blithely disregarded this advice, but for some folk it has become a shibboleth; we used to have an editor (now blocked) on Wikipedia who would obsessively rewrite every sentence beginning with however that he found. (For an abolutely perfect rhetorical positioning of however at the end of a sentence, however, see the final sentence of Garrison Keillor's short story "End of the Trail".)

—Deor (talk) 15:31, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

• It's also important to note that the choice of where to place "however" in a sentence can have a subtle effect on the meaning. "However" is a marker that indicates that some aspect of the sentence is somehow unexpected, and choosing where to place the however can have an effect on "marking" the part of the sentence that is distinctly unexpected. --Jayron32 15:40, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

@Jayron, you used both "affect" and "effect" there, both as nouns. Did you intend this? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:06, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

So corrected.--Jayron32 22:33, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

• Also, see Topic and comment. In "However, John didn't ..." , the sentence is about the contrast ("however") to what preceded this sentence. In "John, however, didn't ..." the sentence is about John as opposed to anyone else. Loraof (talk) 17:49, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

  Likewise, if one said "John didn't, however,..." one would expect the sentence to be a response to the claim that John DID (do whatever is being stated). Also see this discussion of the grammatical meaning of word stress, which has much the same grammatical sense as the use of words like "however" based on position. --Jayron32 18:14, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

"However" indicates any change in direction, while "unfortunately" indicates a negative change in direction. So, the following are all OK:

The child was happy.  However, he was also very sick.
The child was happy.  Unfortunately, he was also very sick.

The child was very sick.  However, he was also happy.

But this is not OK (unless being happy is considered a bad thing, in this context):

The child was very sick.  Unfortunately, he was also happy.

Incidentally, for a strictly positive change in direction, you might use "fortunately":

The child was very sick.  Fortunately, he was also happy.

StuRat (talk) 18:47, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Isn't it obvious that I was not comparing 'however' to 'unfortunately'? I was asking about the position in the sentence of each one. Llaanngg (talk) 20:31, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, not obvious to him. However, the rest of us understood.--Jayron32 22:35, 14 August 2017 (UTC)