My favorite, of course, is the one that gets central billing in the
cartoon, about the word like.
I like that one [yes, that was intentional] because I'm part of the
Stanford ALL Project -- initiated by John Rickford and also involving
Isa Buchstaller, Elizabeth Traugott, Tom Wasow, and me, plus a
supporting cast of students, both undergraduate and graduate -- which
looks at innovative uses of all
(in particular, intensifier all
and quotative all) and ends
up looking at quotative like
as well:
I'm like "Yeah," and she's all "no" [From
the song of the same name by the Mr. T Experience]
(Look for Rickford, Buchstaller, Wasow, and Zwicky on all, to appear soon in American Speech. Manuscript
available here.)
Now, the thing about like
is that, even if you exclude the verb like,
it has so very many uses -- at least: as a preposition, a subordinator,
a discourse particle, a quotative, and a sentence-introducing element,
in an ironic assertional use:
Like I care about what you think.
'I don't care what you think'
And there are subtypes of the prepositional, subordinator, and
discourse particle uses. We've looked at a number of these, in an
unsystematic way, here on Language Log. Back in May 2005, Mark
Liberman assembled a list
of postings up to that point, with pointers to another blog and to
Muffy Siegel's 2002 paper on like
as a discourse particle (which includes references to the earlier
literature on the subject).
In any case, teenagers have been fond of discourse-particle uses of like for quite some time, at least
50 years; some people now in their 50s and 60s still use like this way. Meanwhile,
quotative like has risen in
25 or 30 years to become the dominant quotative in the speech of young
people (and some older speakers use it too). The result is that
some young people are indeed heavy users of like in functions that some of
their elders do not use it in. And many of these older speakers
are annoyed as hell about that.
This strongly negative response deserves some attention and
analysis. Here I'm just going to open up the issues a bit.
When people complain to me about discourse-particle and quotative like,
I ask them why they dislike it so, and they usually say that kids are
just sprinkling a meaningless word (discourse-particle like) all over their sentences and
are inexplicably choosing to use a preposition (quotative (be) like) instead of the perfectly good
verb say. They
characterize these uses as "bad habits"; they are very resistant to the
idea that people who use like
as a discourse particle or quotative are actually DOING THINGS
by their linguistic choices (though the functions of these choices are
what linguists have mostly been interested in); and they are offended
by teenagers' rejection of older standard usages in favor of
innovations. That is, they make no attempt to figure out what
people who use a somewhat different variety from their own are
conveying (they are uncooperative in their interpretation of other
people's speech), and they refuse permission to other people to have
varieties of their own (they demand conformity).
Uncooperativeness and demands for conformity attend responses to
other inter-group linguistic differences, of course, especially when
the groups differ socially, in power or prestige. I have met
people who simply REFUSE to understand "double
negation" (I didn't see no dogs
'I didn't see any dogs') in non-standard varieties, for example.
But young people seem to suffer especially from these responses.
No doubt that's because they are, after all, OUR
children (for some sense of our)
and we are distressed that they refuse to be just like us.
Note that discourse-particle and quotative like have both linguistic value
(they can be used to convey nuances of meaning) and social value
(they're part of the way personas and social-group memberships are
projected). I'm not denying that there are fashions in these
things; a major part of the Stanford ALL Project's recent work, in
fact, has treated changes over time (some of them huge) in the details
of the way people use all and
its competitors. When I talk to those who object so strongly to
"innovative" uses of like, I
try to hit both the linguistic and the social points: the kids are
doing things with these usages, and they're also following fashion (and
there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, especially if you're
15). And: nobody is saying that YOU should be
talking that way.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu