Project Description (Fall 2004): Our research, initiated in 2004, focuses on ongoing changes in the grammar and function of all in conversational American English, especially its use as an intensifier (1), and its use to introduce quotations (2): 1. The guy was scared, and he all jumped and snatched his newspaper. 2. He's all, 'I'm leaving!' Both of these represent innovations in American English, initiated in California within the last two decades and representing a great opportunity for us to study grammatical change in progress. The innovative "quotative all" usage, in particular, is one of several alternatives to quotative say ("He said/says, "I'm leaving!'") that have developed in American and other varieties of English over the past 50 yrs. They tend to express speaker stance or attitude toward the quotation. The other innovations include go and be like, as in (3) and (4). 3. He goes, 'I'm leaving!' 4. He's like, 'I'm leaving!' All is the newest quotative introducer. It appears to have spread to some Western states, but has not yet become a productive alternative on the East Coast or in Canada and England, where go and like have long been reported. Apart from a Stanford senior thesis written fourteen years ago (Wimmer 1990), it has been the subject of only one publication (Waksler 2001). Our study draws on the breadth and expertise of faculty and students in the Linguistics Department of Stanford to study the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the innovative uses of all. We make use of computer corpora of spoken and written language as well as recorded interviews and conversations, and examples drawn from instant messaging and overheard in daily life. (Please send any examples you come across to rickford@stanford.edu to add to our extensive database.) Project Update (Fall 2005) In just over a year, we have made several substantive discoveries about the origins and distribution of all, in both its intensifier and quotative uses, and we have presented our results in three conference papers (Buchstaller and Derringer 2005, Buchstaller and Traugott 2005, Rickford, Buchstaller, Traugott, Wasow and Zwicky Stanford ALL Project. We can summarize our principal findings as follows: The seemingly innovative all tokens that show up in speech and popular media, especially in California, can be separated into an intensifier, that’s essentially very old (we’ve found examples dating back to Old English), and a quotative that’s brand new (the earliest examples we’ve found date to the mid 1980s), but apparently dying out almost as quickly as it arose, becoming overwhelmed by quotative like and all like. Like virtually every variable that’s been investigated by variationists, these features are systematically constrained. Intensifier all has wormed itself into fourth place in frequency, behind really, so and very, and is favored by adjectives types involving physical property or age, color and speed. Quotative all likes to follow other quotatives (e.g. like), demarcating speaker shifts in discourse, as in: 5. And she’s like, “Afraid so”     And I’m all, “WHOA” From The Simpsons, "Separate Vocations" And it’s preferred for the quotation of actual speech rather than thought. Quotatives represent a true hotbed of variability, perhaps because they are a high-profile element of narratives, and they serve as evaluative devices for narrators to present themselves and others to the world. The classic quotative say is rarely used by our young California speakers (just 2% in our tape-recorded corpus), suffering much the same fate as the classic intensifier very (just 9% in our tape-recorded corpus). Other, newer quotatives, especially like and all have taken over the functional load in this area of the grammar and perhaps other alternatives are popping up as we speak. In this area of rampant variability, we find some striking examples of idiolectal variation--like one speaker in Wimmer's (1990) data set, who used all here repeatedly when none of his high school peers did. Never-theless, it is the norm-enforcing character of the social group that comes through more clearly in our data—the fact that all has uniformly morphed into all like at the high school level. In the rapidity of its flux, all is like many kinds of slang. At the same time, it is a grammatical item, rather than a lexical item, competing with grammatical alternatives e.g. like, say and go. While we know many things about intensifier and quotative all that we did not know a year ago, we plan to keep extending our database and to tackle some of the questions we still have not answered to our satisfaction, like exactly what are the performative and subjective elements that intensifier all adds to the sentences in which it occurs, and exactly why quotatives are such a hotbed of variability and change. References Buchstaller, Isabelle and Michael Derringer. 2005. Attitudes towards new ways of reporting and intensifying: ALL. Paper presented at the 34th annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV34), New York University, New York City, October 20-23. Buchstaller, Isabelle, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. "The lady was al demonyak: Historical aspects of adverbial ALL." Paper presented at the 4th conference on Studies in Historical English Linguistics (SHEL4), University of Arizona, Flagstaff, Sep 30-Oct. 1. Rickford, John, Isabelle Buchstaller, Elizabeth Traugott, Thomas Wasow and Arnold Zwicky Stanford ALL Project. 2005. Intensive and Quotative ALL: Something old, something new. Paper presented at the 34th annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV34), New York University, New York City, October 20-23. Waksler, Rachelle. 2001. A new all in conversation. American Speech 76:128-38. Wimmer, Ann. 1990. Be + all and other new quotative introducers in California English. Senior Honors Thesis (supervised by John R. Rickford), Stanford Linguistics Department. Core Personnel: John R. Rickford, Linguistics, Stanford University Isabelle Buchstaller, Linguistics, Stanford and Newcastle University Elizabeth Traugott, Linguistics, Stanford University Tom Wasow, Linguistics, Stanford University Arnold Zwicky, Linguistics, Stanford University Several students, including:  Zoe Bogart (junior, Symbolic Systems), Tracy Conner (senior, Linguistics), Rowyn McDonald (junior, Symbolic Systems), Laura Whitton (graduate student, Linguistics)