Category: school

…and I was like “dude, that’s the quotative use of ‘be like’.”

As I mentioned recently, I’m taking a class. While it’s been a bit of a trip getting back into the swing of attending classes, I’m actually enjoying the class. It’s a sociolinguistics class. A course I’ve been wanting to take for years. I missed taking it as an undergrad, though it was very relevant to one of my majors (linguistic anthropology). (It was offered only every couple of years, and happened to be offered the semester I was studying abroad.)

Anyhow, we’re going to be doing some sort of assignment on the quotative use of be like in English. That is, the use of the verb to be + like to mean, more-or-less “to say.” As in:

I was talking to this guy, and he was like “what’s that all about,” and I was like “How the hell should I know.” And he was like “get over yourself.” And I was like “whatever.”

Of course, this does not necessarily translate into the following dialog:

A: What’s that all about?
B: How the hell should I know.
A: Get over yourself.
B: Whatever.

Unlike when the verb say is used, using be + like doesn’t imply direct quotation. It usually suggests that the speaker is paraphrasing either a quotation, or an attitude or emotional response. It’s also generally used informally. This use of the quotative be like is extremely common not only in American English, but also in Canadian and British English. In spite of its wide use, it’s not always popular and is subject to some discussion even among those who don’t formally study language.

Anyhow, for my class, my professor is like “find an example. Use Google.” And I’m all like “dude, I can find a gazillion examples using Google.”

So, not satisfied with finding just one example for tomorrow’s class, I find myself wanting to dig into the search. And I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned and stumbled across. First, I found this great example of someone playing with the usage of “be all like,” a variant of “be like”:

…the high court ruled 6-3 that former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s play to put Oregon’s assisted suicide law out of business was unconstitutional. See, Ashcroft was all like, “Physician-assisted suicide is not a legitimate medical practice under the Controlled Substances Act and prescribing such lethal medication violates federal law!” But then the Supreme Court was all like, “Ashcroft’s directive is both unlawful, and unenforceable, and the attorney general has overstepped his authority.”

Here are some issues that come up in looking for use of the quotative “be like.”

  • it can be used with different tenses (I was like “dude”, I’m like “dude”, I’ll be like “dude”…) and subjects (I was like “wtf”, you were like “wtf”, he was like “wtf”, we were like “wtf”, Sally was like “no way,” the governor was like “yuh-huh.”)
  • it can be used with a couple of different modifiers (my mom was all like “yo”, he’s totally like “you rock”, I was just like “oh my god”)
  • In searching for some examples of one tense and conjugation, such as “was like,” you run into, like, a medley of other uses of like (eg. “he was like a sloth” or other, “I thought he was, like, amazing” “what life was like back then”)
  • Not all quotative uses co-occur with quotation marks (He was like, no way.), and not all apparent quotations mean a quotative use (The show was like “Repo Man”)

    • I’ve actually found some other cool stuff in my googlings, but since I have to go to bed. I’ll spare you. For now, that is. (Bwa ha ha ha.)

    back to school

    So I started class again today. It’s been over a year since I last took a class. (Though not that long ago since I actually finished the work for that class….) I think I’m getting too old for this. 35 years old. Rushing off to a class where the average age of the students is probably 20. (My face, perhaps in an effort to make me feel younger, has graced me with a nice red zit on my nose. Just in time for the first day of school. It’s like high school revisited.) And can I just say that I didn’t quite feel prepared? As I was rushing around the house trying to get my essentials together for the ride in (car key, wallet, iPod…), I said to myself, “I should bring a pen. I think students use those.” So I grabbed a pen, and hoped that whatever papers were left in my backpack would serve for any note-taking purposes. (I did bring my laptop, though. So, here I sit in class, pretending to take notes. Just kidding! I’m really in the car driving home!)

    So I rushed around this afternoon dealing with registering for class (which I should’ve done weeks ago). And I sat in class with 40+ other students. And I felt almost like I was back in a previous life. And I had various flashbacks to other days in the classroom. Other classes I’d taken, as a grad student, as an undergrad, and even back in high school. And oddly, I had flashbacks to the movie Back to School. Mind you, I’ve never seen more than a few minutes of this movie starring, and apparently largely written by, Rodney Dangerfield. Nor do I want to see any more. (Really not a big fan of Rodney Dangerfield.) But I could somewhat identify with the premise: an old guy goes back to college, where he stands out for being such an old guy. (Also for being loud-mouthed, lewd and crude. Hopefully I didn’t come off as such an oaf.)

    I was going to put together a list of other movies of older folks going back to school. I mean, there must be others I’ve seen or know of. There’s that whole genre of parent/kid body swapping (like Freaky Friday and Vice Versa) that must have some misadventures of adults going to school with a bunch of youngsters. But I really should get to bed instead.

    Oh yeah, and I still owe some pants. I ran off to class earlier with my pants only half- way up. I mean, my pants post. It’ll have to be tomorrow.

    Fait accompli: incomplete complete

    At least, I hope it’s complete. I’m happy to say that I have turned in my paper for my damn incomplete. My professor had set my new deadline as December 15th, and remarkably, I sent in the paper this evening. Over an hour ago. On the 14th. A whole day early. That is, in itself, a newsworthy event.

    My paper was for a Field Methods class I took last fall. Looking at Palestinian Arabic. I looked at intonation. And funny thing, Palestinian Arabic intonation looks shockingly similar to English intonation. Who’d a thunk it? (There’s the short version of my paper.)

    …or else…

    Tomorrow I have to go into Boston to meet with two of my professors. One of them is my advisor, and the other is actually the head of my graduate program. The deal is, I owe them both work. I’m feeling a little like my debts are being called in. I’m not sure what the consequences will be if I don’t make good. I can’t see them sending someone out to rough me up…

    I know that they mean this to be a way to help me move forward with my studies and career-related work. Things have been a bit slower in that area for the past 10 months or so due to an increase in my family size. However, I have not been completely inactive in this area. And I have not been otherwise on vacation. (Actually, I feel ready for a vacation right about now.) However, I still must justify my existence as a grad student by giving a report on two projects that I owe.

    Debt One:
    My incomplete. Or really, I should say My Incomplete. Incompletes are not things to be undertaken lightly. It seems so harmless to ask for a bit of extra time. But this is all an illusion. I knew that going in. I’d had an incomplete before, and it haunted my dreams for over a year before I managed to tackle that monster. This one was only supposed to lead to a delay of a few weeks. A month or two at most. But the class ended last December. And BUreaucracy dictates that I must finish within a year.

    Once upon a time, sometime in early to mid December of last year, I was almost finished with this paper for my Field Methods class. I was working on the topic of intonation. Things were going well. Progress was being made. I was enjoying getting into the data. Then, out of the blue, inconvenience struck. Struck me down. It was actually a pregnancy-related thing, involving pointless and very time-consuming medical tests. And more detrimental to my progress, a whole lot of distracting irritation with the whole process. It only set me back a couple of days, but at a time that I didn’t have a couple of extra days to spare due to other work deadlines rapidly encroaching. So I made that fatal step and asked for the incomplete. I estimated I could finish the paper in about 8 hours. The plan was to get back to it in January or February. January flew by in a rush of very exciting work. And when February hit, I was as big as a house. And apparently never managed to muster up the necessary motivation. Sigh.

    Now many moons have passed, and it will take me more than 8 hours to finish. Because I must refamiliarize myself with all of it. And probably redecide what I want to say. But here’s what I have for data:

    1. 224 .wav format soundfiles of short utterances of Palestinian Arabic produced by a native speaker. They consist of single words, short phrases, short sentences and a few longer sentences and utterances. These include questions and declaratives with varying focus patterns.
    2. All have been labelled in Praat, using TextGrids with time-aligned labels for intonation (using ToBI-based labels), broad IPA transcription, word-by-word glosses, and translation. Some files have additional comments.
    3. I’ve made a small, simple Filemaker database of the files and labels so far, with codings for type of utterance and context.

    I have a very rough outline of the paper, which includes a bit of background, some dicussion points, and some pretty pictures of a few examples, but not yet any description/discussion of those examples (or even examples for many of the types I’d like to discuss.) I have an additional partially labelled eliciation session with the native speaker which contains cool data that I hate to entirely leave out. I’d like to finish labelling and coding it. (However, I think this may be something I’ll have to forego.) What I need to do is discuss the examples, fill in the background section, and summarize my findings. (Basically, “write the damn paper.”)

    Debt Two:
    The project I owe my other professor is either a script or a collection of scripts to help process large quantities of data. The plan is to go from a long soundfile (usually about 30 minutes) to a database with details on individual tokens, and short soundfiles of individual utterances. Happily, this is not new territory for me. It’s also a project that I find very appealing. So far, what I have is a collection of scripts, mostly written by other people, that I have started modifying for our nefarious purposes. Right now, there are several Praat scripts (for chopping big files, and then for getting acoustic measurements based on TextGrid labels). I also have a Perl script (which I mostly wrote myself!) which collects labels from TextGrid tiers that I have used to dump labels into a Filemaker database for my ToBI-related work. I’m thinking that I may be able to do away the Perl script, once I learn more about Praat scripts. Right now, I haven’t figured out a good way to collect labels from point tiers. Most scripts I’ve seen have made more use of interval tiers. But I figure I’ll find the answer with a bit more digging.

    So there it is. Those are (some of) my outstanding debts. I’m hoping the plan for tomorrow is to work out some sort of payment plan. Before the debts are sent to the collection agencies. (Hmm. Another sense of the word collection.)