1231. This week, Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and sits down with linguist Laurel Brinton to talk about little words like “well,” “you know,” and “like.” They look at why “well” signals bad news, how “Beowulf” may open with the Old English version of “you know,” and why “prithee” disappeared. Then they look at why most uses of “like” are older than Valley Girl speech.
1231. This week, Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and sits down with linguist Laurel Brinton to talk about little words like “well,” “you know,” and “like.” They look at why “well” signals bad news, how “Beowulf” may open with the Old English version of “you know,” and why “prithee” disappeared. Then they look at why most uses of “like” are older than Valley Girl speech.
Find Laurel Brinton at blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton.
Find Valerie Fridland at ValerieFridland.com.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Valerie Fridland: Hi, I'm Valerie Fridland. I'm filling in for Mignon this week, and today I am talking with Laurel Brinton. Dr. Brinton is a professor emerita of English language at the University of British Columbia, and she's a leading scholar of how English has changed over time. Her research goes deeply into the history behind everyday expressions such as "well," "you know," "I mean," "what have you," and also that "like" that seems to pop up everywhere these days. She's the author of the book "Pragmatic Markers in English" and co-author of "The English Language: A Linguistic History". Welcome, Dr. Brinton. I'm so excited to have you here. I have long been such a fan.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: It's a pleasure to be here.
Valerie Fridland: I'm really excited to talk with you today because I think the things that you study are things that people use every day and rarely think about, so it's going to both have people more reflective about their language, but also just some fascinating details about the things that we say that are kind of like the glue of our conversations that we don't often think about where they come from and why they developed. But my first question is, you know, you study grammar from a historical perspective, which is so fascinating, but also not the kind of thing you go into college saying, "I'm going to major in that". So just tell me a little bit about how you got started down that path.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: I was an English literature major, and I was getting, well, maybe a little bit tired of doing literary criticism. So the summer before my senior year, I took a grammar course, English grammar course, and the professor said, "Welcome, you've signed up for the most boring course this summer". But of course, I really loved it, and so the next year I took history of English, and Latin, and some linguistics courses. And then I entered graduate school at Berkeley in English with a linguistics emphasis program. And the first term I took Old English from a very charismatic professor, Alain Renoir, and he called me into his office after the course was over, and he said, "Well, you have to take Gothic, Old High German, Old Icelandic, Indo-European, and Greek and Latin". And so I sort of followed his advice, except I never took Greek, actually. And so that set me off studying the history of English, and then I've never really turned back from then.
Valerie Fridland: I love that. And you know what's so funny is you studied all those languages that, you know, are really good for historical perspective, but really don't help you order a beer anywhere. Because they're all dead languages, you know, or are evolved languages that we don't speak in that form anymore.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Of course, modern Icelandic is somewhat close to Old Icelandic.
Valerie Fridland: That's right, because Icelandic is one of those languages that is sort of closer to that Proto-Germanic kind of evolution than English or German are today, so it's a fascinating language. Well, one thing that you've studied that I think a lot of people will be interested in, but probably didn't know the name for before, are little parts of phrases or words that we stick in our sentences called discourse markers. And you've done a lot of research into those, but can you first tell me what exactly they are, and then maybe some common ones we use every day?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Okay, well, discourse markers, which for various reasons I call pragmatic markers, are little words like "like," "so," "right," "well," "just"; fixed phrases like "for sure," "as if," "in fact," "as it were"; and clauses like "I think," "I guess," "I mean," "you know". And they're sprinkled throughout our oral discourse, our oral conversation, and they stand outside the grammar of the sentence, so they're just sort of plugged in there. And they're very common in speech. They also occur in writing, but people see them as meaningless fillers. And so language critics are quite despairing of the use of discourse markers because they see them as meaningless and it reflects sloppy or lazy speaking habits, so they got a bad reputation. But when linguists began to study them and study actual conversation, which didn't really occur until the 1960s or 1970s—before that they just studied written texts and writing—they saw that these little words were not just meaningless, they actually had important functions in discourse, in conversation.
So just to give you one example, like if a friend said to you, "Can you come to dinner this weekend?" and if you began your answer with "well," they'd immediately know that your answer was not going to be exactly what they wanted. It might not be a complete refusal, but it was going to raise a problem. So if you might say, "Well, my parents are visiting". So "well" is doing an important job there. It's saying that what's following is not going to be exactly what the speaker wants to hear, but it's not going to be absolute negative. So this is the sort of thing that they do in discourse, in conversation.
Valerie Fridland: I think what people tend to respond badly to is exactly what you said, is that when you look at where discourse markers occur in our speech, it's outside the grammar. So they're little words that are extraneous. You know, they're not like we have a subject, we have a verb, we have an object. Those seem to be the core parts, right? Nouns and verbs, and often other nouns in object positions. Those are what we think of as real, you know, structures and sentences. But these little extra bits like "well," "you know," "I mean" that we stick in, people often feel like somehow those are, you know, flighty or vacuous. But I think, you know, what you have just discussed and what linguists often discover, and what you have certainly really uncovered in your historical view, is that these have always been necessary to that social greasing we do. Because if you just say, "No, I can't come to dinner," you're going to have a lot fewer friends than if you say, "Well," which sort of means, "I'm appreciating your, you know, feelings here, and I want to let you down gently," right?
So, and one other word I think people talk about a lot in that way that a lot of people complain about—I've heard a lot of, you know, just non-linguists say it's so bad—is the word "so," how "so" functions at the beginning of a sentence. And it's sort of similar in function, right, where it's kind of signaling something different.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, it's very interesting. It occurs quite often. And yeah, it's also suggesting that what follows is maybe not quite what you are expecting or wanting—
Valerie Fridland: Or a backstory. Like a lot of times, I'll see that, you know, you're talking about something, you'll say, "So, guess what," right? Like it's almost a signal of like, "Oh, something different that we're going to talk about". But, you know, they're little words that are like the conversational glue, and it's so funny how people dislike them so much, but as linguists, we know that they're so important. And if you ever tried to talk—a little experiment here, linguistic experiment—try to have a conversation with no discourse markers, it would be a very odd, stilted conversation. It would be kind of robotic, don't you think?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: You wouldn't make many friends that way. And so you mentioned that there are discourse markers not just in speaking, but also in writing, which I think would surprise people. What are examples of those, and how are they different between the way we use them in speech and in writing?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Some examples that you might use in writing, which I think you would almost never use in speaking, is something like "to summarize," or "in conclusion," or "first," "second," "third". So I think they tend to have one of the two major functions that discourse markers have, which is called the textual function, is that they organize our discourse. And they sort of tell the hearer or the reader where you're going and how what follows links up with what goes before, so they structure the discourse. And this is one of the major functions that discourse markers are thought to have.
Valerie Fridland: And that's what we see more in writing, right? That just sort of strictly organizational one. So, you know, one of the ones I think about when I—and I would never say it in speech—is "moreover" or "therefore," which sort of is like, "Okay, here's what I just said, and here's what this next sentence is going to continue from that," or sort of how it connects to it. It's like they're connectors, sort of textual connectors in writing. And that's true, we really use them less that way in speech and more as sort of conversational greasing, I think, right? It's interesting. So, yes, you wouldn't want to use the same discourse markers from writing in speech if you wanted to have many friends, right?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: There's one interesting one that I would have assumed up to fairly recently is one that's used in writing primarily, and that's "that said" or "that being said". And then I started hearing it being used by students all the time in speech, and now I see it all over, used in speech. So it's an interesting one, because it seems to me it still strikes me as sort of formal.
Valerie Fridland: It is. That's interesting. I'll have to listen. I'll have to take a listen. But yeah, I think I can—"that said" or "that being said," you're right. I mean, I can imagine people saying that much more than "therefore," "moreover," right? And, you know, yes, it's true. I wonder whether that's something about, you know, sort of merging that we're doing with text and speech now in these, you know, internet, social media forums, you know, if that kind of crossover speech that's not quite written—
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, the hybrid.
Valerie Fridland: Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. All right, I'll keep my eye on that one. Well, and just sort of in terms of who uses discourse markers, do we find that everybody uses them, or are there certain social groups or age groups or gender groups that use them more? Is that the same in all contexts or in writing and speaking? Or what are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: The myth about discourse markers is that women use them more than men, because they use them because they're insecure, or they use them to get reassurance from the hearer, or they lack confidence. And that idea goes back to sort of early work on women's language. But now that people have studied discourse markers more carefully, it's become clear that that's not the case. Both men and women use discourse markers equally. They may use them in certain ways differently. So people have looked at "you know," and the argument has been that maybe men and women, although they use "you know" equally frequently, maybe use it slightly differently. So that's a possibility.
Valerie Fridland: Oh, interesting.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: So, men and women both use discourse markers. We also think young people use discourse markers a lot more than older people, and this may be misleading as well, because I think what we're picking up on in younger people's speech is newer discourse markers that we hear them using, because they're the ones introducing new discourse markers. And so, as older people, we look, "Oh, they're using 'like' all the time," and they obviously use more discourse markers, but that's not really probably the case.
Valerie Fridland: Right, something known as the frequency illusion, right? Once you notice something, it sounds like you hear it all the time. So other than "like," can you think of other—what are some other novel or newer, sort of flashier discourse markers that you think we're noticing more?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: "Whatever," "as if".
Valerie Fridland: Right, that's right. "Whatever". And "as if," right? Yeah.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah. I just happened to have written on both of those, so they come to mind.
Valerie Fridland: Do you think people are using "I mean" more as a discourse marker rather than, you know, as a statement? "This is what I mean" could be is sort of more of content, but "I mean, I don't really want to do that". That kind of use, do you think that's rising? Because I feel like I notice that more.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, I haven't noticed that, but because "I mean" has been around for a long time. But it may be acquiring new functions.
Valerie Fridland: It's not more like, "I'm correcting myself". So when you say, "Well, I mean, I'm not meaning that particular phrase," where you're kind of correcting or clarifying. I feel like nowadays it's used more kind of sassy, like, "Well, I mean, I don't really know them". You know, that sassy "I mean"? But maybe it's just me.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Oh, another one that's quite recent is "what I'm saying," "what I'm saying is," or "all I'm saying is".
Valerie Fridland: Let's talk about what drives new discourse markers, but before we get to that, I want to also talk about what drives old discourse markers, and then we can sort of maybe see their evolution a little better. But you've studied "Beowulf," and some fascinating work that you've done that I really enjoyed reading is on the fact that "Beowulf," the Old English text, seems to start with a discourse marker, which means discourse markers have obviously been around a really long time, and that's one in writing, so you have to assume they also had them in speech. But can you tell us a little bit about discourse markers in "Beowulf" and also just historically, like when did they start, what were they like?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, well, "hwæt" or "what," which is the first word of "Beowulf," is also the first word of a number of other Old English poems, for years caused problems for translators who were translating "Beowulf" into Modern English, and they would translate it with things like "lo" and "behold" and things like that, which are meaningless forms for modern speakers. And so actually "hwæt" was the one I looked at, the very first discourse marker I ever looked at. And I argued that these Old English poems, which are orally transmitted and would be known by the audience, it means something like "you know". And it's saying, "This is a story, you know, that we all know, and I'm going to tell you about it". And so that was my argument anyway. So it's sort of like Modern English "you know". And you think of children who say, "You know what?" you know, and then they tell you something, so it's sort of similar to that.
Valerie Fridland: Right. You know, my daughter used to say that all the time when she was little: "You know what? You know what?" or "Guess what? Guess what?" So I'm imagining "Beowulf," right, back in Old English times, telling that great story: "Guess what? You know what?" I love it.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: We can trace discourse markers obviously to Old English, the ones that are very common today like "I think" and "I guess" and "you see" or "you know" and "as it were". So a lot develop in Middle English, and where we find them is, say, in "The Canterbury Tales," in Chaucer's representation of speech in "The Canterbury Tales" is a nice place to find them. Because we have a problem if we want to study discourse markers in older periods of English, we don't, obviously, have any records of real conversation. So how do you study discourse markers? So you have to look at represented speech, and we have lots of examples of that. We have plays, which are quite old, going back to Middle English, and we also have court transcriptions of trials that are quite old, and then we have casual writing like letters and diaries where you might expect them to occur as well. So it's not quite as bad as it might seem initially. We do have some records of at least represented speech or actual speech that go back quite a way.
So I've looked at, you know, the discourse markers in Chaucer, for example, and he has lots of them. And then in Early Modern English, we get more, so we just get more and more developing over time, but of course they also fall out of use as well.
Valerie Fridland: That's fascinating. So in Old English, we had some, but maybe not as many as in Middle English, and then in maybe Early Modern, we even get more. Do you think that's because we just have different records, so we didn't have as much ability to find them in Old English? I mean, we don't have that many Old English texts, but then we get a lot more in Middle English. Do you think that's why we don't see as many, or is there something about those periods or the language backgrounds of speakers, maybe mixing of different languages? What's your thought on that, on why we see this implosion?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, I think it's primarily what sort of records we have which have been preserved. And from Old English, we have the poetry of Old English, we also have some things like wills and some prose narratives, but it's all fairly formal kinds of text. And so it's what's preserved, I think, that accounts for the fact that we can't find a lot, but we can find quite a few in Old English. And then in Middle English, we get this more variety of types of texts. We get the plays, and we get things like "The Canterbury Tales," and we start to get letters that we can look at. And so we've got a lot more variety of texts that have lots of different types of language in them.
Valerie Fridland: Right, because you need to have renditions of spoken speech. So when you're having a play, you often have, you know, like, "This is what this character said," and so they're going to represent more oral speech, right? And it seems like "Beowulf" is less that way. It's more of an oral tale, right, an epic tale. So that's so fascinating. And what do you think drives the creation of a new discourse marker? So, you know, you have all these discourse markers. Where do we get a new one from, and what drives that development?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Well, we get them from a variety of types of full words like adverbs, even nouns and verbs, and they start out as full words with full meanings, and then gradually over time, the full meaning is lost, and they start to acquire pragmatic meanings, these textual meanings, and then also the interpersonal meanings that we see discourse markers having. And they become fixed, and they come out of the sentence. They move to the beginning usually of the sentence. They become parenthetical. So it's a gradual process, and so you get forms that you can look at that can be interpreted either way. That is, they might be full words, or they might be discourse markers. And then you get forms that clearly can only be interpreted as discourse markers.
Valerie Fridland: So that's how you can kind of track their progress. So sort of what you're saying is that they start as just words that we would use in content ways, like as a verb or an adverb in part of the grammar, and then it sort of loses that meaning, but maybe keeps some sort of sense ability, right, some aspect of that meaning that then gets used more for interpersonal skills. So tell me an example of that. Can you walk us through an example, like maybe "you know" or something like that?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, so "you know," it starts as a full sentence: "You know that [blah, blah, blah]". So if somebody gave you a box of chocolates and you would say, "Oh, thank you. You know I love chocolates". So I'm saying this is something that the hearer is cognizant of and has knowledge of, that this is my love of chocolates.
Valerie Fridland: A very good love to have.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yes. So it clearly has its full meaning, having knowledge of something, and I'm saying that I know that the hearer has this knowledge. And you could ask then, "Oh, do you know that?" or "How do you know that?" So then you get forms like, "You know John has sold his house". And that's ambiguous, or can be interpreted as, "John has sold his house, you know". So you could ask, "Do I know this?" So that's the full meaning. But I could also ask, "Has he?" And that's where I'm focusing on the clause, this that-clause, and the "you know" is just sort of left out of it altogether.
Valerie Fridland: So you mean like saying, "that he sold his house," as that when you say the that-clause, you mean you're focusing on—
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Right, right.
Valerie Fridland: —"he sold his house" as being the main part of the sentence, and the "you know" is just an extra throw-on.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: It's just added on. And then so it's ambiguous, it could be interpreted either way. In speech, it's usually clear which meaning you are intending because your intonation is different, but in writing, it would be unclear whether you're focusing on the "you know" part as the main meaning, or that "he has sold his house" as the main meaning. So it's thought that because you have these ambiguous constructions, then if they can be interpreted with the that-clause as the main meaning, "he has sold his house," then you can get this "you know" moving around, and then you could say, "He has sold his house, you know".
Valerie Fridland: Right, but if "you know" is the main verb, you can't move it like that. So when you see a structure where it's been moved in a text, then you know it—there you go! So there I'm using "you know"—you know it's a discourse marker. Because I can't say "discourse marker, you know," right? So in that case, because it's the main verb, you can't move it. But when you can start moving it, that's where you have that proof then that it has truly become a discourse marker. I see. That's such a fascinating evolution.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: So it's a gradual process, yeah, it's a gradual change.
Valerie Fridland: How long does it take to go from Like in the history of "you know," what do we see? It's first just used as "you know" as a main verb, and then is there a period of like 100 years, or how long does it often take to switch over, you think?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Couldn't really say, because already when you find "you know" in Middle English, it tends already to be able to be used as a discourse marker. So it's hard to trace these. I would say maybe just a generation that it takes to get this fully into a discourse marker.
Valerie Fridland: Right, that makes sense, because then the kids pick it up on that ambiguity, and then they're moving it. And one thing interesting I think about "you know" is when you're talking about the stress difference, which of course we can't get in a text. That makes it extra hard, which makes your job so hard looking back at these things in text. But when you listen to people and they say "you know," and they're meaning it as a main verb or sort of the main clause, "you know this knowledge," they're never going to say, "y'know, y'know," right? But when we start to use it as a discourse marker, right, we can start shortening it. And you even sometimes see it written that way in texts that are really informal, colloquial, where it's like a y-apostrophe-k-n-o-w or "y'know," right? And so that would be an indicator then in a text that it was probably a discourse marker, right?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Right. And that's typical of discourse markers. They become shortened phonetically. They can become shortened, they become fixed, so they're fixed in form, so you couldn't put it in the past tense, for example. It would always be in the present tense. But they become movable, so they no longer have to occur at the beginning of the sentence, but they could occur at the end or in the middle of the sentence.
Valerie Fridland: So they lose some of their superpowers like being able to be past tense, but they gain new ones like being able to move. So now we know how they get created, but then do they die out? Do we keep them around, or is there a cycling of them so that they get replaced, or how does that work? What's their evolution long term?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: They do fall out of use. If you've read Shakespeare, you're probably familiar with things like "prithee," "marry," "anon". These have all fallen out of use. And why they fall out of use is probably a number of reasons. They become overused, they take on too many functions, or they become sort of mechanical in the way they're used. And so some discourse markers, it's argued in Middle English have become just metrical fillers that a poet can use to fill out his line of verse.
So they just become sort of empty of function, and they have to be replaced. Now, they're replaced with new forms, but the functions that they have remain. I mean, we still have the same functions for discourse markers, it's just that we need new forms.
Valerie Fridland: We need new ones to do it. Right. You know, I find that a lot of things in language, sort of once they get too boring and staid—and particularly with young people, I think this hearkens back to what you said about young people. It feels like they use more because they're using newer ones, and there seems like there's a hyperbolic purpose sometimes to the things we add to our speech, sort of to attention-getting in some ways. Not like, "Look at me, look at me," but more able to sort of highlight what's important or the way you want your phrase taken. And then if you use something over and over again too much, like "anon" and "anon" and "anon," then maybe it's not able to do that anymore. It doesn't highlight the right thing. Is that sort of maybe how it happens, and then someone has to come up with a new one?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, I think one linguist talked about extravagance, used the term extravagance, that we need that in language. So we always need something new.
Valerie Fridland: Right, right. And so I've always wondered when I've read Shakespeare, "prithee," is that from "pray thee"?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Mhm.
Valerie Fridland: Is that a shortening? And then so it kind of—and that's a good example of what you're talking about. As you see its evolution, you could say, "pray thee," where you're actually appealing to someone to pray for you versus and then all of a sudden it becomes "prithee," where it no longer has that meaning. It almost seems like it's often spoken to like a woman to be appealing in some way, to appeal to her senses, sort of versus "pray thee" is sort of an appeal. But yeah, that's a really good example going from "pray thee" to "prithee," where it sort of changes its form as it becomes a discourse marker.
I'd want to bring "anon" back! I love that! It just feels so right. Maybe I'm going to start a movement and get my students in on the game. Okay, so, you know, we talked a lot about discourse markers in English, but I guess my question is about other languages: Is this something that all languages have, and are they functioning the same way in other languages as they do in English, if so?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: I'm not an expert on all the languages of the world, but I would say with pretty much confidence that all languages have discourse markers. I can't imagine a language without discourse markers, and they would probably have the same basic functions that we see in English, that is the textual function and then importantly the interpersonal function, organizing discourse, which is really the main use I think of discourse markers in conversation, that we use them to express our own opinions and to relate to the hearer by, say, softening our opinions or emphasizing our opinions, or expressing intimacy or camaraderie or deference, all sorts of things we do interpersonally. So I would say that all of those functions can be found in discourse markers in probably in all languages.
But they may work slightly differently because of the grammatical systems of the language. So, for example, German has something called modal particles, and they have many of the functions of discourse markers, but they occur what's called the middle field. They have to occur within a sentence. They don't occur at the edges, so they have a very specific syntactic slot that they occur in.
Valerie Fridland: But you could remove them and the sentence would still read as a sentence?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: It would be grammatical, yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Can you give me an example of that?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Something like "aber" or "doch" or "ja".
Valerie Fridland: And what would you translate those as? Or is it hard to translate them because they are really more—
Dr. Lauren Brinton: It's hard to translate them, yeah. Discourse markers are notoriously difficult to translate.
Valerie Fridland: Right, because they're really serving this function of sort of contextual or background or sort of intention of the speaker in that context. Is that right?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah. And then in a language like Indigenous languages, which are highly inflected and where a whole sentence can be a single word, they likely are different. It's suggested that they can be inflections, so they're attached in those cases, or they surround the verb. So they're different because of the very different grammatical patterns in the language.
Valerie Fridland: Right, which makes sense, right? If you're doing everything with endings—so by inflections you're meaning sort of like endings you attach on them—then you're going to need to do your discourse markers that way too because there's no other place to stick them. I'd be curious, I wonder—and I imagine there's probably been some work on this—but, you know, in English, for example, as you said, usually a marker of discourse markers is that it can move, you know, you can put it at the beginning of the sentence, at the end, or sometimes in the middle. I wonder if in Indigenous languages where we find that pattern of inflections being particles, if they also have, you know, this ability to move around or not, or if they're still set. I imagine they have to be set because those languages tend to have a more rigid order for their endings.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: I suspect they're set, but I don't know for sure.
Valerie Fridland: So many fascinating things to explore in this. And then have you ever seen a case where a language has borrowed a discourse marker from another language?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yes. So in terms of borrowing, I can't myself actually say in English that we have any sort of fully accepted discourse marker that's been borrowed, but it has been suggested that some of them have been borrowed from French or Latin like "as it were" or "that is to say". I think, in fact, that they weren't strictly borrowed, that they have native origins, but the French and Latin forms reinforced the forms that were found in English. So I don't know in English of any that are clearly borrowed, but there is writing on French and Norwegian, for example, where they've found English discourse markers being used in those languages. So in Norwegian, for example, this is work by Gisle Andersen, he says "as if" or "yeah, right"—
Valerie Fridland: And you'd say them in English? You would say them in English?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah, you would say them in English. Yeah, yeah, so they're the English words and they just get plunked into Norwegian. In Canadian French, it's also been suggested that there are a number of borrowed discourse markers from English: "anyway," "so, right"—
Valerie Fridland: Well, that would make sense because of contact, right?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah. "My God," "like," "okay". And also in French, there are some borrowed ones. So these are just languages that people have that I know of that people have looked at borrowed discourse markers, and they typically come from English, and that's sort of not surprising because of the global spread of English. But if you had two languages spoken in geographical proximity to one another, you could imagine that discourse markers could be borrowed back and forth between the languages.
Valerie Fridland: I would imagine that's right. On border areas, for example, that probably happens, especially if you're bilingual. I would imagine that you could do that transfer a lot more. And that's probably how English affects, like there's so many more people outside of the United States that speak a different language that speak English than English speakers that speak another language. And so, right, that would also with that global expansion make English so much more accessible and powerful in spreading those out.
I'll say we have to talk about the discourse marker elephant in the room, which is "like". Because I think that's the discourse marker that people are most aware of, hate the most, and assign to young speakers the most. And, you know, a lot of this has to do with exactly what we've been talking about. The reason we often think of young speakers as using it so much is probably because it's a relatively new discourse marker in the history of English. But tell us a little bit about what you know about the evolution of "like" as a discourse marker.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Well, it's not as recent as we might assume. So there are lots of myths about "like": that it's found more often in the speech of girls, that it arose in Valley girl speech in California in the late 20th century, that it's only found in the speech of young people. These are all myths. And that maybe it originated in American English, that also may be a myth as well. It's sort of complicated because there are different uses of "like" as a discourse marker. It can occur before a sentence, but it can also occur within a sentence before a noun or an adjective or a verb phrase. So it could be, "He has like a great figure," "She's like smart," "He like lied to me". So there it's appearing before an adjective or an adverb or a verb.
And then there's something called the quotative "like," and that's when you introduce speech with "be like": "And I was like, 'I'm out of here'". And that's an interesting one because you can introduce actual speech, but you can introduce your thoughts, and it's often your own speech or your imagined speech or your thoughts that you use this for. So the person who's studied "like" most is a colleague of mine at the University of Victoria, Alexandra D'Arcy. And she did a study, which is actually now 20 years ago, that she was looking at data—
Valerie Fridland: Even "like" is old now.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yeah. What she found was that in her study, her sociolinguistic study, she had some older speakers, 80-year-olds, and they were using one of the "likes," that is the "like" before an entire sentence. So these were people who were born in the 1920s. They were already using one of the "likes". And then gradually, sort of her 60-year-olds were using the other types of "like". So the other types of "like" were coming in, but it started with the usage where it's before an entire sentence.
Valerie Fridland: Right, I've seen some of her data where it's kind of interesting. It is at the very beginning of a sentence, but it's not the type, you know, we tend to think of as that sort of Valley girl sentence that follows, you know, the Moon Unit Zappa, "Like, gag me with a spoon".
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Even these other uses, which we think of as Valley girl, aren't. They don't originate there. The only one she says probably originated with Valley girl is the quotative "like," the "be like" construction. And that is indeed probably Valley girl and came in quite recently, or fairly recently. But the other "likes" are quite old, but early 20th century, probably.
Valerie Fridland: And potentially, right, or even maybe older. I think, if I remember correctly, she said maybe even British in origin because there were some that were, like you were talking about, that it's ambiguous a little bit, but in the Old Bailey proceedings, which were those court transcripts from the Old Bailey in London, right, where they had "likes" in some of the trial transcripts from the 1700s that could be interpreted as sort of maybe that transitional "like," where you could either see it as a discourse marker or it could possibly be part of the meaning of the sentence, where that's maybe where we see that beginnings of the movement from "like" functioning as maybe preposition or a conjunction and then being sort of separated from the grammar, right, you know, sort of what you're talking about, the hints of "like" to come.
And that, you know, "like" is actually one of those that I have heard in other languages, right? So that doesn't necessarily get borrowed as "like". I'd be curious, I don't know, do you know if it ever gets borrowed as sort of the English form "like" into other languages?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Supposedly, it's used in Canadian French.
Valerie Fridland: Oh, that would make sense because of such contact with American English. But I have heard from my students doing research on this topic that there are many equivalents that actually in Norwegian, it's like "liksom," which is, you know, not exactly American "like," but clearly a derivative of "like" and it's used in a discourse marker fashion. And then I think there's "genre" in French that is it's not "like" itself, but it functions like "like," and I think there's "como" in Spanish that's also that. So it obviously is a useful discourse marker if so many languages have something like it. Oh, there's "like" again! "Like" is just a useful word.
Well, this has been so fascinating, Laurel. Thank you so much for joining us today on Grammar Girl. Can you tell the audience where they can find out more about you?
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Yes. So I do have a website. It's blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton, all one word. So blogs.ubc.ca/laurelbrinton.
Valerie Fridland: Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Dr. Lauren Brinton: Thank you.