California Youth Trends
This research project, initiated in 2004, focuses on ongoing changes in the grammar
and function of all in conversational American English, especially its use as
an intensifier (1), and its use to introduce quotations (2):
1. The guy was scared, and he all jumped and snatched his newspaper.
2. He's all, 'I'm leaving!'
Both of these represent a great opportunity for us to study grammatical change
in progress. We make use of computer libraries of
spoken and written language as well as recorded interviews and conversations.
We have also worked with Google Inc. using computational methods for data retrieval
on very large internet newsgroups.
Our findings can be summarised as follows:
Intensifier 'all' has wormed itself into fourth place in frequency, behind 'really',
'so' and 'very', and is favoured by adjectives types involving physical property
or age, colour and speed.
In intensifier function, 'all' is essentially very old. We’ve found examples
dating back to Old English, such as (3) and (4)
3. He eall innan samod forswæled wæs and toborsten
‘He all inside entirely burned-up was and burst-apart’ (‘all
of him’ / ‘he was completely’) (ÆCHom I. 221.127)
4. Eall ic wæs mid blode bestemed
‘All I was with blood covered’ (= all of me / I was entirely) (Dream
Rood 48)
However, over time, the types of head before which it can occur have been expanded
from Adjective to participles to PPs and NPs, and finally, in most recent history
to VP.
Quotative all usage, in particular, is one of several alternatives to quotative say ("He said/says, "I'm leaving!'") that have developed in American and other varieties of English over the past 50 yrs.
They tend to express speaker stance or attitude toward the quotation. The other
innovations include go and be like, as in (5) and (6).
5. He goes, 'I'm leaving!'
6. He's like, 'I'm leaving!'
Quotative all likes to follow other quotatives (e.g. like), demarcating speaker
shifts in discourse, as in:
7. And she’s like, “Afraid so”
And I’m all, “WHOA” [From The Simpsons, "Separate
Vocations"]
And it is preferred for the quotation of actual speech rather than thought.
All is the newest quotative introducer. It appears to have spread to some Western
states, but has not yet become a productive alternative on the East Coast or
in Canada and England, where 'go' and 'like' have long been reported.
Quotative all is new but apparently dying out almost as quickly as it arose.
Our survey of multi million word corpora via google revealed that 'all' follows
a rise and fall pattern, being replaced by ' like'.
Output
Buchstaller, Isabelle and Michael Deeringer. 2005. Attitudes towards new ways
of reporting and intensifying: ALL. Paper presented at the 34th annual conference
on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV34), New York University, New York City,
October 20-23.
Buchstaller, Isabelle, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. "The lady was
al demonyak: Historical aspects of adverbial ALL." Paper presented at the
4th conference on Studies in Historical English Linguistics (SHEL4), University
of Arizona, Flagstaff, Sep 30-Oct. 1.
Rickford, John, Isabelle Buchstaller, Elizabeth Traugott, Thomas Wasow and Arnold
Zwicky [Stanford ALL Project]. 2005. Intensive and Quotative ALL: Something
old, something new. Paper presented at the 34th annual conference on New Ways
of Analyzing Variation (NWAV34), New York University, New York City, October
20-23.
Buchstaller, Isabelle and Elizabeth Traugott (2006). “’The lady
was all demonyak.’ Historical aspects of adverbial all.” English
Language and Linguistics, 10(2): 345-370.
Buchstaller, Isabelle, John Rickford, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky and Elizabeth Traugott (2006). “The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation.” Paper presented at NWAV 35, The Ohio State University, November 2006.
Rickford, John, Isabelle Buchstaller, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky and Elizabeth Traugott (2007). "Intensive and Quotative ALL: Something old, something new." American Speech, 82(1): 3-31
Buchstaller, Isabelle, John Rickford, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky and Elizabeth Traugott (2010). "The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data." To be submitted to Language Variation and Change, 22 (2010), 1–29
Core Personnel:
- John R. Rickford, Linguistics, Stanford University
- Isabelle Buchstaller, Linguistics, Newcastle University
- Elizabeth Traugott, Linguistics, Stanford University
- Tom Wasow, Linguistics, Stanford University
- Arnold Zwicky, Linguistics, Stanford University