more "like"

[William Mann]

Following up the discussion on "like,"  there are some aspects and
references that I haven't seen mentioned yet here.   There was a conference
in September 1998 in Milwaukee called the "24th UWM Linguistics Symposium"
(University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.)  I was there and took notes, and I am
including below an edited clip from those notes.


Suzanne Fleischman  and Marina Yaguello,   in <Discourse Markers Across
Languages?: Evidence from English and French>,  they have focused on "like"
and corresponding terms in French.

In <Discourse Marker Use in Native and Non native English Speaking Korean
Americans>, Hikyoung Lee focuses on "well," "you know" and "like" along with
corresponding Korean phrases. Fleischman  and Yaguello note a number of
parallel developments between "like" and "genre" in French.  "This striking
functional parallelism raises questions about diachronic parallelism..."  To
me it also raises interesting questions about an underlying functional unity
of some sort.  "Like" is developing a kind of function that in some ways
resembles evidentials, reporting inner states through an interesting variety
of inner speech, a speech that is not spoken.  The idea of "like" as a
hedging evidential, an avoidance of definite commitment and definite truth,
is worth consideration.

A conference volume was published, I think.

The above is possibly enough so that the two papers in question can be
found.  If not, I may be able to find more.

Happy study.

Bill Mann