The Semantics of Like

In the wonderful world of words, a number of specialists inhabit the high ground: The grammarians whisper dry admonitions, the usage mavens opine on correctness, and the lexicographers guard the gates of the lexicon.

The linguists, however, are the technicians in the garage. The Raven likes to keep an eye on what they're up to from time to time, and finds a recent story about Temple University linguist Muffy E.A. Siegel to be surprisingly accessible. Siegel successfully submitted a research paper to Oxford University's Journal of Semantics—no mean feat—detailing her findings regarding the word "like."

While there is no dispute regarding the traditional functions of "like," the grammarians take a dim view of the colloquial version, as parodied in Zappa's "Valley Girl":

So like I go into this like salon place, y'know
And I wanted like to get my toenails done
And the lady like goes, oh my God, your toenails
Are like so grody
It was like really embarrassing
She's like oh my God, like bag those toenails
I'm like sure...
She goes, uh, I don't know if I can handle this,
y'know...
I was like really embarrassed...

Moon Unit's use of "like" is the sort of thing that causes the pedant to howl in rage, but the linguist is more likely to begin with the assumption that the word must be serving a useful purpose or the speaker would not be using it. That's where Muffy Siegel comes in.

The Valley Girl version of "like" is classified by linguists as a "discourse particle," along with "um," "well," "oh" and the like.

So far so good, but we already knew that. Siegel goes further, though, and observes that "like" can alter the meaning of sentences in ways that standard fillers would not:

Qualification: She's got like, five or six cats. [uncertainty]
Introduction of exaggeration: He's like, a total geek. [hyperbole]
Signal of hedging: He wants to, like, ask me out. [hesitation]
Synonym for "said": He's like, "I'm outta here." [quotation]

Even as a signal of hedging, you can see that "um," does not replace this sense of "like" and also that each use shown above is distinctly separate. Eventually, all of these senses are likely to be added to the dictionary as auxiliaries to the standard ones. Interestingly, Siegel tried interviewing teenagers to garner samples of "like" in their speech and didn't have much luck. That's because speakers tend to be on guard with respect to register in formal settings. But her daughter had also been taping her friends for an unrelated project and, as a peer, had obtained numerous instances of "like" in the wild, so to speak.

In Siegel's abstract for the Journal of Semantics, she summarizes her findings in part:

Indeed, I show that, due to its formal properties, like can be interpreted only during the assignment of model-theoretic denotations to expressions, along the lines of Lasersohn's (1999) pragmatic haloes. These results support the idea that weak/strong is not a unitary distinction and suggest that the various components of grammars must be organized to allow information from pragmatic/discourse elements to affect basic compositional semantics.

I think she's saying that the usage of certain words depends on what the speaker intends them to mean. Didn't Humpty-Dumpty say the same thing to Alice?