Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new

Abstract

This article presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of the lexeme all in its intensifier and quotative functions. We delimit the new from the old functions of the lexeme and present a variationist account of all's external and internal constraints in various syntactic environments. Our analysis is based on a variety of data sets, which include traditional sociolinguistic interviews as well as data culled from Internet searches and a new Google-based search tool. On the basis of these data sets, we show that intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments. We further pinpoint the syntactic and semantic niches which all has appropriated for itself among California adolescents and compare its patterning with that of other intensifiera in our data and the data of other researchers. All's extension to quotative function, however, is new, apparently originating in California in the 19805. Our investigation of its development spans across data sets from 15 years. Using variable rule analysis and other quantitative techniques, we examine the distribution of quotative all vis-à-vis its competitor variants (including be like, say, and go) and show that the constraints on quotative all have undergone a marked shift in recent years and that quotative all is in decline right now, after peaking in the 1990s. Copyright 2007 by the American Dialect Society.