"like" and "as if"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:04 AM -0700 6/24/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Jun 23, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>At 4:16 PM -0400 6/23/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>>
>>>"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>>>
>>>>from Garry Tudeau's Doonesbury strip of 6/21/05:
>>>>
>>>>-----
>>>>A: So basically you're quitting your job to go to a party.
>>>>B: Oh, like you've never done that?
>>>>-----
>>>>
>>>>here, "like" + clause is punctuated as a question (presumably with a
>>>>rising final intonation), but a somewhat more assured response would
>>>>use an assertion...
>>>
>>>Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
>>>
>>>>I can't prove it, but I'm sure I was using this construction by
>>>>1970 and
>>>>probably some years before that, though as an ironic or sarcastic
>>>>statement rather than a question. The interrogatory force may come
>>>>simply from the widely disdained "uptalk" phenomenon, which I at
>>>>least
>>>>took no note of till the mid '70s.
>>>
>>>When it's an ironic/sarcastic assertion, there is often heavy
>>>stress on
>>>the NP following "like" (especially if it's a monosyllabic pronoun):
>>>
>>>"Like *that* matters!"
>>>"Like *you* care!"
>>>"Like *he* would know!"
>>>
>>>The sarcasm can be emphasized by a preceding interjection ("yeah",
>>>"oh",
>>>"ah", "hah", etc.).
>>
>>cf. also "a lot" in the same frames, e.g. "A lot *that* matters!"
>>
>>Larry
>>
>>>This construction is hard to search for in the databases, but
>>>here's an
>>>example of ironic assertional "like" from 1966...
>
>just to bring out something we're all assuming here: what makes this
>construction "ironic assertional" is that it conveys the negation of
>the expressed proposition.  "like that matters" conveys 'that doesn't
>matter', and "like you've never done that" conveys 'you've done that'.
>
>(i'm weaseling by using "conveys", so as not to have to decide
>whether it's implication or some kind of implicature that's at issue.)
>
Well, it's a strong enough negation to license negative polarity
items, as I noted in a couple of old papers, citing the sentence:
"A (fat) lot of good *that* ever did me".
(Cf. the non-ironic "A lot of good has (*ever) been done by such efforts.")
And along the same lines:
"As if/Like *you'd* ever have a snowball's chance in hell of solving
any of those problems."

Larry