Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Last time, it was a Bizarro couple, now it’s Zits‘s Jeremy and his parents:

Different social setting — parent-child relationships rather than couple relationships — but the expression is just as ominous for the party who’s told the two sides need to talk.

Bonus: a nice example of quotative be all like — which, as the Stanford All Project notes in an American Speech article and in a forthcoming Language Variation and Change article, has been encroaching on the territory of quotative all (while quotative like is the dominant variant in vernacular conversation these days). Jeremy’s use looks like one of the possible sources of fused all like: quotative like modified by intensifier all ‘really, totally’.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2010 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.