Abstract
In this chapter Ranger looks at three values of “like”. The schematic form for prepositional “like” serves as a template for discourse marking and quotative uses. Prepositional uses of “like” can construct two values: similarity and exemplarity. In both cases a locatum is determined by virtue of a property consensually shared in common with a locator. Values of exemplarity serve as a basis from which to derive discourse marking values of “like”, the difference being that in discourse marking values, the locator refers to linguistic rather than extralinguistic material. Quotative “be like” highlights the quoted material as emblematic of a generic situation or as a plausible report among others. The co-construction of meaning implied in the schematic form of “like” additionally lends itself to the construction of shared linguistic identities.
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- 1.
But not necessarily to many alternative definitions of what a discourse marker is.
- 2.
“like, adj., adv., conj., and prep.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017. Web. 20 June 2017. Variations within this category will be dealt with in Sect. 6.3.
- 3.
Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
- 4.
The fact that like as a preposition has given rise to so few papers supports the view that this is felt to be the default value.
- 5.
See Sect. 2.4.6 above for quantitative / qualitative (QNT / QLT) modes of determination of a notion.
- 6.
A rough-and-ready way of generating this type of constructional template using the BNCweb is first to search for typical left-hand environments of like NP, represented for example as “like_PRP ((_AT0 (_{A})? _NN+)|(_PNP|_PNI))”, and then to use the first set of results to refine subsequent searches. The search is of questionable precision and recall, but does enable one to spot broad constructional patterns.
- 7.
Subscript indices are used to represent the intrication between relationships since one term may enter into more than one relationship, as locator or locatum. The limits of linearity are obvious, but that is no surprise, since language is all about squeezing non-linear Level 1 cognitive representations into necessarily linear Level 2 linguistic representations on (Sect. 2.3).
- 8.
The use of like as a conjunction equivalent to as if is of course stigmatised by prescriptive grammatical convention, but poses no particular problem for the explicative model presented here.
- 9.
The reader will have noted the parallel construction cites such as… towns like… in (3), in support of this reformulation.
- 10.
As noted above, inclusion implies both identification and differentiation. The symbol ⊇ is used analogously to denote this compound relationship.
- 11.
Other indefinite pronouns enter into the same sort of relationship (everything like NP2, nothing like NP2). In each case a scanning operation over an unstructured domain is stabilised thanks to the localisation with like.
- 12.
It would be a shame here not to quote the deliciously paradoxical How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you? uttered by Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
- 13.
Note the difference in value, despite the formal identity, between this type of utterance and conjunctive like in the following, Why couldn’t he wear a toupee like me? CAS 920 → not a sort of toupee but wear a toupee like I do or Another rarity at Staloluokta is the church, even to a heathen like me A6T 1117 → not a sort of heathen but a heathen like I am.
- 14.
Whatever the precise status of the relationship (class / occurrence, empty form / occurrence, indefinite occurrence / specific occurrence). Specifically, on the basis of our examples, Paisley is a town (3), the RAND health insurance experiment is something (21) and you are a girl (26) for example.
- 15.
- 16.
In Chap. 2 we saw that operations of identification, differentiation, etc. might be represented as positions relative to a notional domain. In this respect, it would alternatively be possible to project the representation of predicative like, for example, on the notional domain P, with the locator y as a preexisting, consensual occurrence of P at the organising centre of the domain, and the locatum x as a subjectively constructed occurrence of P, identified to y by the speaker.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
Underhill’s paper is widely cited as the basis for the argument that discourse marking like marks focus, but the idea is already well present in an insightful study into the syntax of this like by Ross and Cooper (1979).
- 20.
D’Arcy also distinguishes quotative like of course, but we will deal with this later in Sect. 6.4.
- 21.
Space prevents me in the current context from considering other accounts, but I must make mention of Siegel (2002), who suggests that use or overuse of like in her corpus of high-school students’ utterances is a consequence of little forward planning, and who proposes an interesting formal account of the logical semantics of discourse marking like, drawing upon Lasersohn’s concept of a “pragmatic halo”. See also Dufaye (2012, 2016), Fleischmann (1998), Fleischmann and Yaguello (2004) or Vigneron (2013), for comparative approaches to like and related markers in French and German.
- 22.
These interpretations depend on considerations such as the hierarchical relationship between locutors, but are not marked linguistically as such. This operational template is in many respects similar to certain values of I think (Chap. 7).
- 23.
See Chap. 7 for more analysis of the role of position in the construction of referential values.
- 24.
Note that, in argumentative terms, the speaker is arguing for the largeness of the house and four floors tends towards this conclusion.
- 25.
(37) adds support to the argument in favour of deriving discourse marking like from non-predicative, exemplary like.
- 26.
Note in this respect the argumentative coorientation of all day in (38a) and kids in (38c).
- 27.
The fact that discourse marking like is no innovation is noted by D’Arcy 2005, p. 4, 67 sq. or Romaine and Lange 1991, p. 270, although earlier occurrences of this type tend to be placed clause-finally. The earliest mention of quotative like appears to be in Butter’s editor’s note to Schourup (1982, pp. 148–149).
- 28.
The draft additions to the Oxford English Dictionary quote from Frank Zappa’s parodic celebration of valley girl style, “Valley Girl” (1982): “She’s like Oh my God.” (“like, adj., adv., prep., and conj., and n.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 25 August 2015.)
- 29.
I will not in the current context be dealing directly with be like as a phenomenon of grammaticalisation, nor will I be considering be like from a contrastive perspective. The reader may consult Buchstaller (2001, 2014, pp. 148–197) D’Arcy (2005), Romaine and Lange (1991) for issues of grammaticalisation, and Dufaye (2016), Fleischman (1998), Fleischman and Yaguello (2004) or Vigneron (2013) for contrastive analyses with French and German.
- 30.
As Buchstaller and D’Arcy point out, there are methodological differences between these studies which render meaningful comparison difficult (Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009, p. 298).
- 31.
- 32.
Tannen’s “graphic verbs” are verbs that indicate speech and manner of speech. She lists, for example, explain, whisper, scream, shout and suggest (Tannen 1986, p. 322). Buchstaller (2001) suggests that go and be like are appropriate in contexts of mimesis or showing, compared to say and think which are used in contexts of telling. Blyth et al. (1990) claim that quotative go is associated with a male style of speech, and be like with a female style: “In general, respondents found the use of go to be indicative of uneducated, lower-class males and the use of be like indicative of middle-class teenage girls” (Blyth et al. 1990, p. 224). Fuchs (2012), however, proposes an alternative analysis where alternation between quotatives marks differentiation between speakers in oral narrative.
- 33.
The reference is to the chapter “Response Cries” in Goffman (1981).
- 34.
Tree and Tomlinson’s study in fact rejects “approximation theory”, and defends the thesis that be like is simply encroaching on other quotative devices, “as a catch-all enquoting device to cover the many ways that a quote can be a selective depiction of the original including the words, delivery, emotional content, or any other aspect the speaker wishes to demonstrate” (Tree and Tomlinson 2007, p. 99). Particularly interesting in the present context is their choice of the term “selective”.
- 35.
There are few clear conventions for punctuating quotative be like, reflecting both the orality of the form, and the fact that, in the words of Romaine and Lange, “discourses introduced by like blur the boundaries between direct and indirect representations of both speech and thought report” (Romaine and Lange 1991, p. 234).
- 36.
It would be more precise to say “verbal or paraverbal”: the expression is not necessarily linguistic, and may involve onomatopeia, gesture, etc.
- 37.
Consider how “wow” might be defined: “something you say if you are surprised / amazed / impressed”, where the situation of “being surprised / amazed / impressed” is recognisably a property of the utterance “wow”. See also in this respect Fuchs 2012, “It is mainly used in cases of non specific exemplification, to illustration typical situations with the help of prototypical segments of discourse.” (Fuchs 2012, p. 276. My translation.)
- 38.
In connexion with this, Romaine and Lange note a “set marking function” in some uses of like (Romaine and Lange 1991, p. 248)
- 39.
The symbols employed are conventional for speaker, co-speaker and third-person or speech community, the values of each being calculated as identification, differentiation or disconnection, respectively (Sect. 2.4.2).
- 40.
- 41.
The present author was not aware of what “Throwback Thursday” referred to, before Wikipedia enlightened me. It is apparently a hashtag (#ThrowbackThursday or #TBT) applied to nostalgic photographs on social media platforms.
- 42.
“Like has a capacity to suggest the lack of full internalisation of expressions in the linguistic repertoire, and it is not unlikely that the reason why like is so frequent in teenage conversation is precisely because of its metalinguistic function” (Andersen 2000, p. 31). “Like in many cases reflects a deliberate choice to mark off an expression as one which is not fully internalised in the vocabulary, and it reflects the teenagers’ wish to express their ideas without sounding too assertive” (Schourup 1983, p. 32).
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Ranger, G. (2018). Discourse Marker Uses of like: From the Occurrence to the Type. In: Discourse Markers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70905-5_6
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