Beowulf’s ‘you know,’ Shakespeare’s ‘prithee,’ and the myth of Valley Girl ‘like,’ with Dr. Laurel Brinton

Studying the History of English

0:00Hi, I'm Valerie Friedland. I'm filling in for Mignon this week, and today I'm talking with Laurel Brinton. Dr. Brinton is a professor emerita of English language at the University of British Columbia, and she's a leading scholar of how English has changed over time. Her research goes deeply into the history behind everyday expressions such as, well, you know, I mean, what have you, and also that like that seems to pop up everywhere these days. She is the author

0:33of the book Pragmatic Markers in English and co-author of The English Language, A Linguistic History. Welcome, Dr. Brinton. I'm so excited to have you here. I have long been such a fan. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you today because I think the things that you study are things that people use every day and rarely think about, so it's going to both have people more reflective about their language, but also just some fascinating details about the things that we say that are kind of like the glue of our conversations that we don't often think about

1:05where they come from and why they developed. But my first question is, you know, you study grammar from a historical perspective, which is so fascinating, but also not the kind of thing you go into college saying, I'm going to major in that. So just tell me a little bit about how you got started down that path. I was an English literature major and I was getting maybe a little bit tired of doing literary criticism. So the summer before my senior year, I took a grammar course, English grammar course, and the professor said, welcome. You've signed up for the most boring course this

1:37summer. But of course, I really loved it. And so the next year I took history of English and Latin and some linguistics courses. And then I entered graduate school at Berkeley in English with a linguistics emphasis program. And I took the first term I took old English from a very charismatic professor, Alain Renoir. And he called me into his office after the course was over and he said, well, you have to take Gothic, Old High German, Old Icelandic, Indo-European, and Greek and Latin.

2:13And so I sort of followed his advice, except I never took Greek, actually. And so that set me off studying the history of English. And then I've never really turned back from then. I love that. And you know what's so funny is you studied all those languages that, you know, are really good for historical perspective, but really don't help you order a beer anywhere. Because they're all dead languages, you know, or evolved languages that we don't speak in that form anymore. Of course, modern Icelandic is somewhat close to old Icelandic.

2:45That's right, because Icelandic is one of those languages that is sort of closer to that proto-Germanic kind of evolution than English or German are today. So it's a fascinating language.

What Are Discourse Markers

2:55Well, one thing that you've studied that I think a lot of people will be interested in, but probably didn't know the name for before, are little parts of phrases or words that we stick in our sentences called discourse markers. And you've done a lot of research into those. But can you first tell me what exactly they are? And then maybe some common ones we use every day? Okay, well, discourse markers, which for various reasons, I call pragmatic markers, are little words like, like, so, right, well, just, fixed phrases like, for sure, as if, in fact,

3:29as it were, and clauses like, I think, I guess, I mean, you know. And they're sprinkled throughout our oral discourse, our oral conversation. And they stand outside the grammar of the sentence. So they're sort of plugged in there. And they're very common in speech. They also occur in writing. But people see them as meaningless fillers. And so language critics are quite despairing of the use of discourse

3:59markers, because they see them as meaningless and reflects sloppy or lazy speaking habits. So they got a bad reputation. But when linguists began to study them in study actual conversation, which didn't really occur until the 1960s or 1970s. Before that, they just studied written texts and writing. They saw that these little words were not just meaningless, they actually had important functions in discourse

4:31in conversation. So just to give you one example, like, if a friend said to you, can you come to dinner this weekend? And if you began your answer with, well, they'd immediately know that your answer was not going to be exactly what they wanted. It might not be a complete refusal, but it was going to raise a problem. So if you might say, well, my parents are visiting. So well is doing an important job there. It's saying that what's following is not going to be exactly what the speaker wants to hear,

5:05but it's not going to be absolute negative. So this is the sort of thing that they do in discourse and conversation. I think what people tend to respond badly to is exactly what you said, is that when you look at where discourse markers occur in our speech, it's outside the grammar. So it's, they're little words that are extraneous. They're not like, we have a subject, we have a verb, we have an object. Those seem to be the core parts, right? Nouns and verbs and often other nouns and object positions. Those are what we think of as real, you know, structures and sentences, but these

5:37little extra bits like, well, you know, I mean that we stick in, people often feel like somehow those are, you know, flighty or vacuous. But I think, you know, what you have just discussed and that what linguists often discover and what you have certainly really uncovered in your historical view is that these have always been necessary to that social greasing we do. Because if you just say, no, I can't come to dinner, you're going to have a lot fewer friends than if you say, well, which sort of means I'm appreciating your, you know, feelings here and I want to let you down gently, right?

6:11So, and one other word I think people talk about a lot in that way that a lot of people complain about, I've heard a lot of, you know, just non-linguists say it's so bad, is the word so, how so functions at the beginning of a sentence. And it's sort of similar in function, right? Where it's kind of signaling something different. Yeah. It's very interesting. It occurs quite often. And yeah, it's also suggesting that what follows is maybe not quite what you are expecting or wanting. Or a backstory. Like a lot of times I'll see that, you know, you're talking about something,

6:44and you'll say, so guess what, right? Like it's almost a signal of like, oh, something different that we're going to talk about. But you know, they're little words that are like the conversational glue. And it's so funny how people dislike them so much. But as linguists, we know that they're so important. And if you ever tried to talk a little experiment here, linguistic experiment, try to have a conversation with no discourse markers, it would be a very odd stilted conversation. It'd be kind of robotic, don't you think? Yeah. Well, you wouldn't make many friends that way.

Writing Versus Speech Markers

7:16And so you mentioned that there are discourse markers, not just in speaking, but also in writing, which I think would surprise people. What are examples of those? And how are they different between the way we use in the speech and in writing? Some examples that you might use in writing, which I think you would almost never use in speaking is something like to summarize, or in conclusion, or first, second, third. So I think they tend to have one of the two major functions that discourse markers have, which is called the textual function, is that they organize

7:51our discourse. And they sort of tell the hearer or the reader where you're going, and how what follows, links up with what goes before. So they structure the discourse. And this is one of the major functions that discourse markers are thought to have. And that's what we see more in writing, right? That just sort of strictly organizational one. So, you know, one of the ones I think about when I, and I would never say it in speech is, moreover, or therefore, which sort of is like,

8:22okay, here's what I just said. And here's what this next sentence is going to continue from that, or sort of how it connects to it. It's like they're connectors, sort of textual connectors in writing. And that's true. We really use them less that way in speech and more as sort of conversational greasing, I think, right? That's interesting. So yes, you wouldn't want to use the same discourse markers from writing and speech if you wanted to have many friends, right? Yeah. There's one interesting one that I would have assumed up to fairly recently is one that's used

8:57in writing primarily. And that's that said, or that being said. And then I started hearing it being used by students all the time in speech. And now I see it all over used in speech. So it's an interesting one, because it seems to me, it still strikes me as sort of formal. It is. That's interesting. I'll have to listen. I'll have to take a listen. But yeah, I think I can, that said, or that being said, you're right. I mean, I can imagine people saying that much more than therefore, moreover. Right. And, you know, yes, it's true. I wonder whether that's something about,

9:32you know, sort of merging that we're doing with text and speech now in these, you know, internet, social media forums, you know, if that, that kind of crossover speech, that's not quite written. Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. All right, I'll keep my eye on that one.

Who Uses Discourse Markers

9:48Well, and then just sort of in terms of who uses discourse markers, do we find that everybody uses them? Or are there certain social groups or age groups or gender groups that use them more? Is that the same in all contexts or in writing and speaking? Or what are your thoughts on that? The myth about discourse markers is that women use them more than men, because they use them because they're insecure, or they use them to get reassurance from the hearer, or they lack confidence. And that's sort of that idea goes back to sort of early work on women's language. But now that people have

10:24studied discourse markers more carefully, it's become clear that that's not the case. Both men and women use discourse markers equally. They may use them in certain ways differently. So people have looked at, you know, and the argument has been that maybe men and women, although they use, you know, equally frequently, maybe use it slightly differently. So that's, that's a possibility. Oh, interesting. So men and women both used, you know, discourse markers. We also think young people use discourse

10:57markers a lot more than older people. And this may be misleading as well, because I think what we're picking up on in younger people's speech is newer discourse markers that we hear them using, because they're the ones introducing new discourse markers. And so as older people, we look back, we look and know, oh, they're using like all the time. And they obviously use more discourse markers, but that's not really probably the case. Right. Something known as the frequency illusion, right? Once you notice something,

11:29it sounds like you hear it all the time. So other than like, can you think of other, what are some other novel or newer sort of flashier discourse markers that you think we're noticing more? Or whatever, as if. Right. That's right. Whatever. And as if, right? Yeah. Yeah. I just happened to have written on both of those. So they come to mind. Do you think people are using I mean more as a discourse marker rather than, you know, as a statement, well, this is what I mean could be is sort of more content. But I mean, I don't really

12:00want to do that. That kind of use, do you think that's rising? Because I feel like I noticed that more. Yeah. I haven't noticed that, but because I mean, it's been around for a long time. So it's, but it may have, it may be acquiring new functions. It's not more like I'm correcting myself. So when you say, well, well, I mean, I'm not meaning that particular phrase where you're kind of correcting or clarifying. I feel like nowadays, it's used more of kind of sassy, like, well, I mean, I don't really know them, you know,

12:30that sassy, I mean, but maybe it's just me. Another one that's quite recent is what I'm saying,

Discourse Markers in Beowulf

12:38what I'm saying is, or all I'm saying is. Let's talk about what drives new discourse markers. But before we get to that, I want to also talk about what drives all discourse markers, and then we can sort of maybe see their evolution a little better. But you've studied Beowulf and some fascinating work you've done that I really enjoyed reading is on the fact that Beowulf, the old English text, seems to start with a discourse marker, which means discourse markers have obviously been around a really long time, and that's one in writing. So we have to assume

13:11they also have them in speech. But can you tell us a little bit about discourse markers in Beowulf and also just historically, like when did they start? What were they like? Yeah, well, what, or what, which is the first word of Beowulf, it's also the first word of a number of other old English poems, for years caused problems for translators who were translating Beowulf into modern English, and they would translate it with things like lo and behold, and things like that, which are meaningless forms for modern speakers. And so actually, this was what was the one I looked

13:43at, very first discourse marker I ever looked at. And I argued that these old English poems, which are orally transmitted, and would be known by the audience, it means something like, you know, and it's saying this is this is a story, you know, that we all know, and I'm going to tell you about it. And so that was my argument anyway. So it's sort of like modern English, you know, and you think of children who say, you know what, you know, and then they tell you something. So it's sort of similar to that.

14:15Right. You know, my daughter used to say that all the time when she was little, you know what, you know what, or guess what, guess what. So I'm imagining Beowulf, right, you know, back in old English times telling that great story. Guess what, you know what, I love it. We can trace discourse markers, obviously, to old English, the ones that are very common today, like I think, and I guess, and I, and you see, or, you know, and as it were, so a lot develop in Middle English. And where we find them is, say, in the Canterbury Tales, in the Chaucer's representation

14:47of speech in the Canterbury Tales is a nice place to find them, because we have a problem if we want to study discourse markers in older periods of English. We don't obviously have any records of real conversation. So how do you study discourse markers? So you have to look at represented speech, and we have lots of examples of that. We have plays, which are quite old, going back to Middle English. And we also have court transcriptions of trials that are quite old. And

15:18then we have casual writing, like letters and diaries, where you might expect them to occur as well. So it's not quite as bad as it might seem initially. We do have some records of at least represented speech or actual speech that go back quite a ways. So I've looked at, you know, the discourse markers in Chaucer, for example, and he has lots of them. And then in early modern English, we get more. So we just get more and more developing over time. But of course, they also fall out of use

15:51as well. So that's fascinating. So in Old English, we had some, but maybe not as many as in Middle English. And then in maybe early modern, we even get more. Do you think that's because we just have different records? So we didn't have as much ability to find them in Old English? I mean, we don't have that many Old English texts, but then we get a lot more in Middle English. Do you think that's

16:21why we don't see as many? Or is there something about those periods or the language backgrounds of speakers, maybe mixing of different languages? What's your thought on that, on why we see this implosion? Yeah, I think it's primarily what sort of records we have, which have been preserved. And from Old English, we have the poetry of Old English. We also have some things like wills and and some prose narratives. But it's all fairly formal kinds of texts. So it's what's preserved,

16:55I think, that accounts for the fact that we don't see a lot of, we can't find a lot, but we can find quite a few in Old English. And then in Middle English, we get this more variety of types of texts. We get the plays, and we get things like the Canterbury Tales, and we start to get letters that we can look at. And so we've got a lot more variety of texts that have lots of different types of language in them. Right, because I sort of, you need to have renditions

17:26of spoken speech. So when you're having a play, you often have, you know, like this, this is what this character said. And so they're going to represent more oral speech, right? And it seems like Beowulf is less that way. It's more of a moral tale, right? An epic tale. So that's so

How Discourse Markers Evolve

17:44fascinating. And what do you think drives the creation of a new discourse marker? So, you know, you have all these discourse markers, what, where we get a new one from? And what drives that development? Well, we get them from a variety of types of full words, like adverbs, even nouns and verbs. And they start out as full words with full meanings. And then gradually over time, the meaning is lost,

18:18this, the full meaning is lost, and they start to acquire pragmatic meanings, that these textual meanings, and then also the interpersonal meanings that we see discourse markers having. And they become fixed. And they come out of the sentence, they move to the beginning, usually of the sentence, they become parenthetical. So it's a gradual process. And so you get forms that you can look at that can be interpreted either way. That is, they might be full words, or they might be discourse

18:53markers. And then you get forms that clearly can only be interpreted as discourse markers. So that's how you can kind of track their progress. So sort of what you're saying is that they start as just words that we would use in content ways, like as a verb or an adverb, in part of the grammar, and then it sort of loses that meaning, but maybe keeps some sort of sense ability, right? Some aspect of that meaning that then gets used more for interpersonal skills. So tell me an example of that. Can you walk

19:23us through an example, like maybe, you know, or something like that? Yeah, so you know, it might start as, well, it starts as full sentence, you know, that blah, blah, blah. So if somebody gave you a box of chocolates, and you would say, Oh, thank you, you know, I love chocolates. So I'm saying, this is something that the hearer has cognizant of, and has knowledge of that. This is my love of chocolates. A very good love to have.

19:53Yes. So it clearly has its full meaning, having knowledge of something. And I'm saying that I know that the hearer has this knowledge. And you could ask then, Oh, do you know that? Or how do you know that? So then you get forms like, you know, John is sold his house. And that's ambiguous, or it can be interpreted as John is sold his house, you know. So you can say, Oh, you could ask, Do I know this? So

20:28that's the, that's the full meaning. But I could also ask, Has he? And that's where I'm focusing on the, the clause, this, that clause. And the, you know, is just sort of left out of it all together. So you mean, like, saying that he sold his house as that when you say that clause, you mean you're focusing on, right, he sold his house as being the part, the main part of the sentence, and the, you know, is just an extra throw on, it's just added on. And then, so it's ambiguous,

21:02it could be interpreted either way. In speech, it's usually clear with which meaning you are intending, because your intonation is different. But in writing, it would be unclear whether you're, you're focusing on the, you know, part as the main meaning, or that he has sold his house as the main meaning. So it's thought that because you have these ambiguous constructions, then they, if they can be interpreted with the, that clause as the main meaning, he sold his house, then you can get

21:33this, you know, moving around. And then you could say, he has sold his house, you know. Right. But if you know is the main verb, you can't move it like that. So when you see a structure where it's been moved in a text, then you know, there you go. So they're amazing, you know, you know, it's a discourse marker, because I can't say discourse marker, you know, right? So that, in that case, because it's the main verb, you can't move it. But when you can start moving it, that's where you have that proof, then that it has truly become a discourse marker. I see.

22:03That's such a fascinating evolution. Oh, it's a gradual process. Yeah, it's a gradual change. How long does it take to go from, like, in the history of you know, what do we see? It's first just used, as you know, as a main verb. And then is there a period of like 100 years? Or how long does it often take to switch over, you think? I couldn't really say. Because already, when you find you know, in Middle English, it tends already to be able to be used as a discourse marker. So it's hard to, it's hard to trace these, I would say, maybe just a generation that it takes

22:38to get this fully into a discourse marker. Right, that makes sense. Because then the kids pick it up on that ambiguity, and then they're moving it. And one thing interesting, I think about, you know, is when you're talking about the stress difference, which of course, we can't get in a text, that makes it extra hard, which makes your job so hard looking back at these things in text. But when you listen to people, and they say, you know, and they're meaning it as a main verb, or sort of the main clause, you know, this knowledge, they're never going to say, yeah, no, you know, right. But when we

23:10start to use this discourse marker, right, we can start shortening it. And you even sometimes see it written that way in texts that are really informal colloquial, where it's like a Y apostrophe no, or you know, right. And so that would be an indicator then in a text that it was probably a discourse marker, right? Right. And that's, that's typical of discourse markers, they become shortened phonetically, they can become shortened, they become fixed. So they're fixed in form. So you couldn't put it in the past tense, for example, it would always be in the present tense,

23:42but they become movable. So they no longer have to occur at the beginning of the sentence, but they could occur at the end or in the middle of the sentence. So they lose some of their superpowers, like being able to be past tense, but they gain new ones, like being able to move. So now we know how they get created, but then do they die out? Are we, do we keep them around? Or what, you know, what, is there a cycling of them so that, you know, they get replaced? Or how does that work? What's their evolution long term? They do fall out of use. If you've read Shakespeare, you're probably

24:13familiar with things like Prithy, Prithy, Mary, Anon. These have all fallen out of use. And why they fall out of use is probably, there are probably a number of reasons. They become overused, they take on too many functions, or they become sort of mechanical in the way they're used. And so some discourse markers, it's argued in Middle English, have become just metrical fillers that a poet can use to fill out his line of verse. So they just become sort of empty of function, and they have

24:49to be replaced. Now they're replaced with new forms, but the functions that they have remain. I mean, the functions, we have still the same functions for discourse markers. It's just that we need new forms. We need new ones to do it. So, right. Is it part, you know, I find that a lot of things in language sort of once they get too boring and stayed, and particularly with young people, I think this harkens back to what you said about young people, it feels like they use more because they're using newer ones. And there seems to like there's a hyperbolic purpose sometimes to the things we add

25:23to our speech, sort of to attention getting in some ways, not like, look at me, look at me, but more able to sort of highlight what's important or the way you want your phrase taken. And then if you use something over and over again too much, like and on and on and on and on, then maybe it's not able to do that anymore. It doesn't highlight the right thing. Is that sort of maybe how it happens? And then so someone has to come up with a new one? Yeah, I think one linguist talked about extravagance. Yes, right. Use the term extravagance, that we need that in language. So we always need something new.

25:55Right, right. And so I've always wondered when I've read Shakespeare, prithee, is that from pray thee? Is that a shortening? And then so it kind of, and that's a good example of what you're talking about. As you see its evolution, you could say pray thee, where you're actually appealing to someone to pray for you versus, and then also it becomes prithee, where it no longer has that meaning. It almost seems like it's often spoken to like a woman to be appealing in some way to appeal to her senses, sort of versus pray thee is sort of an appeal. But yeah, that's

26:28a really good example going from pray thee to prithee, where it sort of changes its form as it becomes a discourse marker. I want to bring a non back. I love that. It just feels so right. Maybe I'm going to start a movement and get my students in on the game. Okay, so we talked a lot

Markers Across Other Languages

26:46about discourse markers in English, but I guess my question is, you know, about other languages. Is this something that all languages have, and are they functioning the same way in other languages as they do in English, if so? I'm not an expert on all the languages of the world, but I would say with pretty much confidence that all languages have discourse markers. I can't imagine a language without discourse markers, but, and they would probably have the same basic functions that we see in English, that is the textual function, and then importantly, the interpersonal function, organizing

27:21discourse, which is really the main use, I think, of discourse markers in conversation, that we use them to express our own opinions and to relate to the hearer by, say, softening our opinions or emphasizing our opinions or doing, expressing intimacy or camaraderie or difference, all sorts of things we do interpersonally. So I would say that all of those functions can be found in discourse markers and probably in all languages, but they may work slightly differently because of the grammatical

27:55systems of the language. So, for example, German has something called modal particles, and they have many of the functions of discourse markers, but they occur what's called the middle field. They have to occur within a sentence. They don't occur at the edges. So they have a very specific syntactic slot that they occur in. But you could remove them and the sentence would still read as a sentence? It would be grammatical, yeah. Can you give me an example of that? Something like aber or doch or ja. And what

28:30would you translate those as? Or is it hard to translate them because they are really more... It's hard to translate them. Yeah. Discourse markers are notoriously difficult to translate. Right. Because they're really serving this function of sort of contextual or, you know, background or sort of intention of the speaker in that context. Is that right? Yeah. Interesting. And then in a language like indigenous languages, which are highly inflected and where a whole sentence can be a single word, yeah. They likely are different. It's suggested that they can be inflections. So they're attached

29:08in those cases, or they surround the verb. So they are different because of the very different grammatical patterns in the language. Right. Which makes sense, right? If you're doing everything with endings, so by inflection, you're meaning sort of like endings you attach on them, then you're going to need to do your discourse markers that way too, because there's no other place to stick them. I'd be curious. I wonder, and I imagine there's probably been some work on this, but, you know, in English, for example, as you said, we can take the usually a marker of discourse markers that it can

29:41move. You know, you can put it at the beginning of the sentence, at the end, or sometimes in the middle. I wonder if in indigenous languages where we find that pattern of inflections being particles, if they also have, you know, this ability to move around or not, or if they're still set. I imagine they have to be set because those languages tend to have a more rigid order for their endings. I suspect they're set, but I don't know for sure. So many fascinating things to explore in this. And then have you ever seen a case where a language

30:11has borrowed a discourse marker from another language? Yes. So in terms of borrowing, I can't myself actually say in English that we have any sort of fully accepted discourse markers that's been borrowed, but it has been suggested that some of them have been borrowed from French or Latin, like as it were, or that is to say. I think in fact that they weren't strictly borrowed, that they have native origins, but the French and Latin forms

30:42reinforced the forms that were found in English. So I don't know in English of any that are clearly borrowed, but there is writing on French and Norwegian, for example, where they've found English discourse markers being used in those languages. So in Norwegian, for example, this is work by Gisela Andersen. He says, as if, or yeah, right. And you'd say them in English. You would say them in English? Yeah. You would say them in English. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they're the English words and they just

31:15get plunked into Norwegian. In Canadian French, it's also been suggested that there are a number of borrowed discourse markers from English anyway. So, right. Well, that would make sense because of contact, right? Yeah. My God, like, okay. And also in French, there's some borrowed ones. So these are just languages that people have, that I know of, that people have looked at borrowed discourse markers. And they're typically come from English and, and that's sort of not surprising because of the

31:46global spread of English. But if you had two languages spoken in geographical proximity to one another, you could imagine that discourse markers could be borrowed back and forth between the languages. I would imagine that's right. On border areas, for example, that probably happens, especially if you're bilingual. I would imagine that you could do that transfer a lot more. And that's probably how English affects, like there's so many more people outside of the United States that speak a different language that speak English than English speakers that speak another language. And so, right, that would

32:18also with that global expansion, make English so much more accessible and powerful in spreading those

The Evolution of Like

32:23out. Um, I'll say, we have to talk about the discourse marker elephant in the room, which is like, because I think that's the discourse marker that people are most aware of, hate the most and assigned to young speakers the most. And, you know, a lot of this has to do with exactly what we've been talking about. The reason we often think of young speakers as using that it so much is probably because it's a relatively new discourse marker in the history of English. But tell us a little bit about what you know about the evolution of like as a discourse marker. Well, it's not as recent as we

32:58might assume. So there are lots of myths about like that it's found more often in the speech of girls that arose in valley girl speech in California in the late 20th century. That's only found in the speech of young people. These are all myths. And that maybe it originated in American English that also may be a myth as well. It's sort of complicated because there are different uses of like as a discourse marker. It can occur before a sentence, but it can also occur within a sentence before a noun

33:32or an adjective or a verb phrase. So it could be, he has like a great figure. She's like smart. He like lied to me. So there it's appearing before an adjective or an adverb or a verb. And then there's something called the quotative like, and that's when you introduce speech with be like, and I was like, I'm out of here. And that's an interesting one because you can introduce actual speech, but you can introduce your thoughts. And it's often your own speech or your imagined speech or your thoughts

34:05that you use this for. So the person who studied like most is a colleague of mine at the University of Victoria, Alexandra Darcy. And she did a study, which is actually now 20 years ago that she was looking at data. Even like is old now. Yeah. What she found was that in her study, her sociolinguistic study, she was looking at a speech of, she had some older speakers, 80 year olds, and they were using one of the likes, that is the like before the entire sentence. So these were

34:39people who were born in the 1920s. They were already using one of the likes. And then gradually, sort of her 60 year olds were using the other types of like. So the other types of like were coming in, but it started with the usage where it's before an entire sentence. Right. I've seen some of that. I've seen some of her data or it's kind of interesting. You know, it is at the very beginning of a sentence, but it's not the type, you know, we tend to think of those sort of Valley Girl sentence that follows, you know, the Zappa, the moon unit Zappa, like gag me

35:17with a spoon. Even these other uses, which we think of as Valley Girl, aren't. They don't originate there. The only one she says probably originated with Valley Girl is the quotative like, the bee like construction. And that's, that is indeed probably Valley Girl and came in quite recently or fairly recently. But the other likes are quite old, but early 20th century, probably. And potentially, right, or even maybe older, I think if I remember correctly, she said maybe even

35:47British in origin, because there were some that were like you were talking about that it's ambiguous a little bit, but in the Old Bailey proceedings, which were those court transcripts from the Old Bailey in London, right, where they had likes in some of the trial transcripts from the 1700s that could be interpreted as sort of maybe that, that transitional like, where you could either see it as a discourse marker, or it could possibly be part of the meaning of the sentence where that may be where we see that

36:18beginnings of the movement from like functioning as maybe preposition or a conjunction, and then being sort of separated from the grammar, right, you know, it's sort of what you were talking about the hints of like to come. And that, you know, like is actually one of those that I have heard in other languages, right? So it that doesn't necessarily get borrowed as like, I'd be curious, I don't know, do you know if it ever gets borrowed as sort of the English form like into other languages? Supposedly, it's used in, in Canadian

36:50French. Oh, that would make sense because of such contact with American English. But I have heard from my students doing research on this topic that there are many equivalents that actually in Norwegian, it's like licksong, which is, you know, not exactly American like, but clearly a derivative of like, and it's used in a discourse marker fashion. And then I think that genre in French, that is a it's not like itself, but it functions like like, and I think there's como in Spanish, that's also

37:22that. All right. So it's, it's, it obviously is a useful discourse marker. If you know, so many languages have something like it. Oh, and there's like, again, like is just a useful word.

37:35Well, this has been so fascinating, Laurel. Thank you so much for joining us today on Grammar Girl. Can you tell the audience where they can find out more about you? Yes. So, so I do have a website. It's blogs.ubc.ca slash Laurel Brinton, all one word. So blogs.ubc.ca slash Laurel Brinton. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you.