Like, Whatever The Syntactic Evolution of a Morpheme

Abstract

This paper was originally written for Dr. Heather Bliss’s LING 282W course, Writing for Linguistics. The assignment asked students to expand, elaborate, or adapt one of their earlier Linguistics writing exercises or assignments into a short experimental or argument paper. This required that students identify a research question for which a methodology could be designed and implemented to elicit results that confirm (or disconfirm) a hypothesis. The paper uses APA citation style.

This paper seeks to illuminate the syntactic contribution of the morpheme, like. Although like has been validated as constituents of several syntactic categories, such as verb, noun, adverb, and preposition (Montell, 2019; McWhorter, 2016), it has been defined as a meaningless filler word when it appears as casual interjections in speech. In this study, we posit that like is not a meaningless filler word, but a flexible constituent that can move within and across phrases. We analyze like through the lens of the pop culture canon, drawing examples from modern English (American, British, Irish) and extracting six sound bites from movies, television, and music from the past twenty years to represent current patterns of speech from speakers of all ages and genders. Using various syntactic constituency tests, including movement and omission, we uncover the syntactic contribution of like, revealing that while it is omnipresent in speech, like performs a very important communicative function: as an emphatic discourse marker at the beginning, middle or end of a syntactic phrase. By parsing like and identifying its purpose in dialogue and the ways in which it is very much hedged by syntax, we can deduce its universality in speech across languages and discover how these similarities can influence and shape cultural identity and cross-linguistic landscapes.