Learn English – the name of the grammatical device where 18th and 19th Century sentences started with ‘which’

grammarhistory

In the movie Master and Commander – we see the following two dialogues between Jack Aubrey and his servant Killick:

Dialogue 1:

JACK: Killick? Killick there.

KILLICK appears.

JACK (CONT'D): What do you have for us tonight?

KILLICK: Which it's, Soused Hoggs-Face.

JACK: Aah! My favorite.

Dialogue 2:

KILLICK: That's the last of the cheese and like as not they'll leave it seizing to their plates with their tweedly tweedly tweedly.

JACK (O.S.) Killick? KILLICK THERE!

KILLICK (projecting) Which it will be ready when it's ready!

This tendency to start a sentence with Which is echoed in the books.

My question is: What is the name of the grammar where 18th and 19th Century sentences started with 'which'?

Best Answer

I don't think one can meaningfully ask what is the name of this "grammar"? But expanding on my earlier comments, Killick is using which as a "discourse marker" (aka "filler").

It just so happens we don't use that particular word in that way today - but many of us might use alternatives such as er, um, ah, well, so, right, okay in OP's context.

I found these interesting observations in The semantic status of discourse markers (1997)...

... although some markers may be syntactically integrated, they equally often seem to be extra-clausal, and positionally variable, elements which make no predictions about, nor are they predicted by, the presence of other syntactic elements in their host units. Their function is typically adverbial or interjective, and as such they may be deleted from their host units without this resulting in ungrammaticality.

That's in the context of the author discussing the grammaticalization of discourse markers, by which he means the process whereby some given term starts out as a "content word" (a noun, verb, etc. which does actually reference/mean something specific), but gradually becomes a "function word", defined on Wikipedia as...

Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.

TL;DR: In OP's examples, initial Which (which as a "content word" would be a pronominal reference to something explicitly presented earlier in the text/discourse) is effectively a "function word" with little or no semantic content (about equivalent to initial Well as used today).

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