In recent decades, the word like as a filler has been used increasingly frequent especially in American daily conversation, and in my opinion, has almost become stereotypical of the American variant of English. When I was in school learning to use English, I was not taught and would not use like the way I have throughout the past couple of years I study in the United States.

I find it intriguing how colloquial language, in this case, the filler like, which usually deems mundane to people, plays a significant role in shaping the dynamics of a conversation, influencing how English speakers think and articulate ideas. This paper will include a brief timeline of the like phenomenon, examine various functions of like and discuss ways in which people develop judgements and assumptions about others based on the rate of like in their speech.

The birth of like as a conversation filler dated back to the second half of the 20th century and linguists began to notice and look into this word in the 1980s. According to the 2015 Boston Globe article, during this period, the rise of like was likely originated from “Frank Zappa’s 1982 parody “Valley Girl” song [as it] suggests: “She’s like oh my god /like bag those toenails…” This marked a time when the primary use of the word is to report indirect speech. Later in the 1990s, studies found that the young generation half of the time used the filler like to introduce a quote (Peterson, 2015).

Since then, research on the filler like began to take place in order to explain the rationale behind the new functions of the word (Fuller, 2003). There is a quotative like and a discourse marker like. The former serves as an equivalence of ‘say’ and also introduces “inner monologue, speaker attitude, or non-verbatim renditions of dialogue.” For example, “I was like, are you ok? And she’s like, the worst thing just happened to me!” would mean the same as “I asked her: Are you ok? And she responded: The worst thing just happened to me!” The discourse marker function is slightly more difficult to distinguish. It is used to suggest “approximation or looseness of meaning” (Fuller, 2003). A lot of scholarly research concentrates on the discourse marker like so more examples of this function will be extensively discussed later in this paper.

While there are substantial nuances between the two types, these distinctions are not obvious to the general public. In particular, a person without background knowledge in linguistics might not be able to tell how, like in “It was like, the best day of my life!” and “My professor was like, let’s have a pop quiz today,” are not similar to each other. Therefore, linguistic forms of like are not the focus of this research project. Instead, I am more concerned with the broader spectrum of the filler like in terms of its communicative purposes in different contexts.

Fuller argues that “looseness of meaning” does not fully describe the properties of like and agrees with Underhill, who introduces another function of like as the “focus of the utterance.” Below are two excerpts taken from the interviews conducted by Fuller that demonstrates this idea:

“I used to work for, like, the public defender of my home town.”

“She was, she’s like, eight years older than me…so there was actually kind of a big age difference, but we just hit it off.”

In these above circumstances, the filler gives off a sense of a small pause, anticipating more important information ahead. The speaker in the first example puts emphasis on her workplace – the public defender, which is not an approximation of the truth. The speaker in the second example seems to highlight the age difference between her and her friend, and not on the fact that they are exactly eight years apart. The notion of focus can also connote a desire to clarify a preceding idea. Here is another case from an interview by Fuller:

“A: Well, let’s see, what, what kind of accommodation do you have these days? Like, do you, do you have a house or do you rent an apartment, what is it that you live in?”

Speaker A uses like as a bridge to further explain the aforementioned question, in particular what this person means by “accommodation.” It is also a way of narrowing the word, making it more specific and suggesting possible answers to the other person. Like, therefore, is a reformulation that marks the flexibility of the examples (Fuller, 2003).

An approximation and a focus are not the only ways to classify a variety of likes in daily speech. This filler can represent internal thought of a speaker, an uncertainty of an evidence and even a hypothetical scenario (Romaine and Lange, 1991). To express an inner thought, someone may say: “My boss suddenly called me up for an urgent meeting, and I was like, oh no did I do something wrong?” To convey a sense of doubt, one can say: “She told me she remembered meeting me before, but I didn’t recall anything so I said, umm like… when again?” A case of hypothesis happens when, for instance, a person says “a friend of mine could not come to see this exhibition today but I’m pretty sure, he’ll be like, really jealous with me!” All of these groupings certainly open up to a wide range of interpretations of like as a multifunctional constituent of our everyday talks. They show that new language uses are formed and refined in a certain way to serve modern needs.

Linguists might have not gone further into the nitty-gritty of the filler like if people had not made connotations and judgements, either consciously or not, about others according to their frequency of saying like. Superficiality and lack of intelligence have been stereotypically assigned to the word like because some people associate the use of this word with being inefficient in communication (Fuller, 2003).

Yet based on other studies, such as that of Hesson and Shellgren (2015), while like can be initially linked to less intelligence, the word sends out a feeling of friendliness. The two researchers ask participants to listen to clips of people talking and then instantly choose whether they think these people are likely to be intelligent or unintelligent and friendly or unfriendly. Surprisingly, although people tend to have negative reactions in the first place, many of them eventually change their attitudes toward those who say like a lot. According to the study’s final results, people said that after having some time to process the way a person speaks, even if it was packed with likes, they still wanted to be friends or hang out with them. Therefore, it is concluded that the criteria to assess intelligence and friendliness are different, and that there are a lot of ideological, psychological and interactional elements that come into play.

Perhaps excessive exposure to hearing like improves people’s tolerance to a point where they do not see that it is anyhow an issue. Given its malleability, concepts and impressions on like are subject to changes in both personal preference and social standards.  

Having been studying English for more than 15 years, it was surprising to me how I was never taught to use like as a conversation filler but I picked it up right after a few months immersing myself in an American college environment. This drives my curiosity and determination to learn more about whether these uses are fairly new and if not, why they have yet found a place in an official academic setting.

It has come to my attention that no matter how intentional or unintentional, many people use the word like for an excessive number of times in daily conversations. Too often I find it less persuasive or well-thought when someone inserts like not just once but multiple times, even just briefly between almost every one or two word in the same sentence. It would not become over-noticeable if the word is moderately used as any other filler such as “you know”, “say”, “well” and so forth. It is also unclear to me why I react more critically against like as supposed to other fillers. Nevertheless, what I hold a strong opinion about is that the more time people spend thinking about what needs to be said, the more accurate they can elaborate on it and the more convincing they become. From my perspective, this is best achieved through descriptive words and phrases, not via vague, nonspecific terms.

Given the fast-paced and hectic lifestyle nowadays, it is reasonable that we need quicker alternatives that help us get our points across. In spite of this understanding, I believe that as civil communicators, people should pay more attention to how they speak and optimize the words they use. While I have had a better grasp of how like works as suggested by the experiment, arguments and justifications developed in Fuller’s and Romaine’s research along with the study by Hesson and Shellgren, I still think that relying on like in an uncontrollable manner can make people more dependent on the word. Without an intention to use this filler moderately, we would prolong a conversation but fail to get straight to the intended idea.

The filler like has become a common speech property in our modern conversations regardless of age, gender and educational backgrounds. It is undeniably useful when we want to convey reported speech, express internal thoughts, explain a previous topic or exude a sense of affability and approachability. As predicted by modern linguists, the like trend will likely stick around for a longer period of time. However, in order to foster and maintain an effective and rich vocabulary to communicate, English speakers should make more conscious choices of how and how much colloquial language, such as the filler like, is turning into a dominating component of our daily exchange.

Is the like trend now comparable to a fish-in-the-water phenomenon? Has like become so ubiquitous that it is growing to be a norm and even an extending part of English that should be brought up in the classroom? How much is acceptable and will the prevalence of like ever be harmful to the English language?

References

Fuller, J. M. (2003). Use of the discourse marker like in interviews. Journal of sociolinguistics, 7(3), 365-377. Print.

Hesson, A., & Shellgren, M. (2015). Discourse marker like in real time: Characterizing the time-course of sociolinguistic impression formation. American Speech, 90(2), 154-186. Print.

Peterson, B. (2015). Linguists are like, ‘Get used to it!’ – The Boston Globe.

Romaine, S., & Lange, D.. (1991). The Use of like as a Marker of Reported Speech and Thought: A Case of Grammaticalization in Progress. American Speech, 66(3), 227–279. Print.

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