He goes, and I'm like
So being stuck at home for the rest of the day, I thought I will do some reading. I remebered listening the other day to a nice conversation between two sales ladies in a clothes shop, with one telling the other a story involving her boyfriend. While telling the story, almost every sentence started with either "he goes" or "I'm like". So I was reading today an article entitled "He goes and I'm like: The new quotatives revisited" (I. Buchstaller, 2004), which was generally discussing the linguistic and social significance of these expressions. I especially liked the comparison between these expressions and other speech verbs such as "say" in terms of the latter focusing on "the semantics, the propositional impact of the quote" while the former focuses on the presentation as they are often used to "perform the reported event rather than merely telling it". Interesting, because I think I do notice that with these two expreessions the speaker is often trying to 'mimic' the tone of voice or gestures of the person he is quoting.
One other interesting thing mentioned in the paper is the "Birds of a Feather Effect", roughly the common lexical behaviour of certain items. Although, I found it a bit weird when the author says: "The 'Birds of a Feather Effect' has been defined by Scherre and Naro (1991, 1992) as 'birds of a feather flock together'". I mean, is this really a definition?
Anyway, I'm like it's an interesting paper.
Mai
One other interesting thing mentioned in the paper is the "Birds of a Feather Effect", roughly the common lexical behaviour of certain items. Although, I found it a bit weird when the author says: "The 'Birds of a Feather Effect' has been defined by Scherre and Naro (1991, 1992) as 'birds of a feather flock together'". I mean, is this really a definition?
Anyway, I'm like it's an interesting paper.
Mai
posted by Mai at 12:56 AM
2 Comments:
That's no definition. I heard Ron Carter talk yesterday. he's been doing a lot of work on 'the grammar of talk' recently. He presented the top 40 most common words in their (fairly big) spoken corpus (CANCODE). He said 'like' (at number 26) was what is known as a 'chart riser' and he predicted it'll soon be on the top 10,mainly because of its use to introduce direct speech. He pointed out the age aspect of this, saying it's incredibly common in people under 35.
B-)
Interesting. And yeh I think the sociolinguistic aspect of this is crucial. This is what I love about corpus-based studies, they directly reflect facts of language use.
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