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speech 76.2 (2001)

A NEWamerican
ALL IN
CONVERSATION
RACHELLE WAKSLER
San Franscisco State University

New constructions using all in the discourse of San Francisco teenagers and young adults are exemplied in (1)(4).
1.
2.
3.
4.

Shes all, I didnt tell you to call him.

So I opened it, and my mother was all mad.
Shes all screaming about the guy.
And hes all like this with his leg.

This study documents the distribution of this new usage of all, distinguishes
it from the quantier all, and presents an analysis of all as a marker of a
speakers upcoming unique characterization of an individual in the discourse. I argue that, although all is found in a variety of syntactic environments, it bears a single discourse function that identies its scope with what
the speaker perceives as a single salient property or set of properties. This
hypothesis unies the disparate syntactic and discourse environments in
which this marker appears and accounts for differences between all and its
syntactically viable alternatives.
The rst section presents data to document the wide variety of syntactic
environments in which all appears (as compared to the quantier all, which
is highly restricted in distribution). The second section introduces the
quotative use of the new all. The third analyzes all as a marker of the
speakers upcoming unique characterization of some entity in the discourse. Finally, all is contrasted with the noncontrastive focus marker like
(Underhill 1988; Miller and Weinert 1995) and the quotative like (Blyth,
Recktenwald, and Wang 1990; Romaine and Lange 1991), also found in
this speech community.

THE DATA
The new all has a surprisingly wide syntactic distribution. It has been
observed preceding adjective phrases (APs), verb phrases (VPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), a noun phrase (NP), and a sentense (S), though it is
most commonly heard before APs and VPs. In contrast, the quantier all is
a specier that semantically modies an NP and syntactically either precedes its NP or undergoes Q-oat, moving to a post-NP position (e.g., All the
American Speech, Vol. 76, No. 2, Summer 2001
Copyright 2001 by the American Dialect Society

128

A New all in Conversation

129

birds ew away The birds all ew away). Unlike the quantier all, the new all
cannot oat and always precedes the material over which it has scope.
Examples are drawn from a corpus of 160 tokens of all that were
recorded after hearing them in naturally occurring speech in San Francisco over the past four years. The speakers were teenagers and young
adults. Though this was not a controlled sociolinguistic study,1 all was
obser ved to be used in casual conversation by large numbers of teenagers
and young adults of both genders, from a variety of ethnic and social
backgrounds, gay or lesbian and straight. The examples below demonstrate
all in each of its new syntactic environments, with all plus its scope in each
particular discourse in small caps.2

ALL + ADJECTIVE PHRASE

All occurs preceding APs in (5)(8), where the scope of all is sometimes
lexical, (5) and (6), and other times phrasal, (7) and (8).
5.
6.
7.
8.

Why? Do you feel all goofy?

This bus does go to Geary. Oh, I was gettin all scared.
Im all proud of myself for getting the question right.
It got me all totally excited because I, like, loved Star Wars when I was a
kid; those movies were my whole life.

Two differences can be noted between the new all and the traditional
use of all in preadjectival position. First, the new all has not been observed
to have any semantic restrictions on the adjectives it can precede. The
traditional use of all is semantically restricted to appear with only a subset
of adjectives in English. So, for example, shes all wet is ne with the
traditional all, but shes all hungry is not. In (5)(7), all is used with adjectives
which would not allow the traditional all.
Second, the traditional all does not allow scope over phrasal APs. In a
sentence like (8), the traditional all could be used with the adjective excited,
but not with the AP totally excited. In (9) and (10), which use adjectives
acceptable with the traditional all, the scope of all ranges over only the
adjectives, not over the following PPs.
9. Are you all nished with that project?
10. Shes all wet from the rain.

In contrast, (7) and (8) demonstrate the use of the new all with scope over
phrasal APs.

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american speech 76.2 (2001)

ALL + VERB PHRASE

All is frequently found with scope over a VP, as shown in (11)(16).

11.
12.
13.
14.

Man, he was all frontin [acting angr y].

There she was on the phone all callin me up.
Omar was all makin faces at Ms. Johnson yesterday.
Sonny was talkin to Darna, and she was all tellin him about your
shit.
15. I was all laughing at him for days! Then he goes, Why are you
laughing?
16. Im all sitting there lonely.

The examples in (11)(16) were heard in stories in which past actions were
being related, using either past tense or the historical present. All in (12)
(16) has scope over not only the verb but also the direct object (1214), the
PP (1315), and the locative plus adjunct adverb (16). Example (17) shows
that all is not restricted to past tense or historical present and can be used
with ongoing or habitual action.
17. Girlfriend, how should I know?! You know her, she travels all over the bar,
all talkin bout startin over, startin over.

Several examples in the corpus show the use of all with scope over what
in some syntactic frameworks would be a VP and in others a nonconstituent,
for instance, (18)(20).
18. Im all in the back seat with my milk carton.
19. He was all like this with his leg [shows leg position].
20. He stopped by, and I was all there holding my milk carton.

In (18), the speaker is lamenting being seen in what she perceived to be an

unattractive state (in the back seat of a car outside the convenience store,
holding a carton of milk) by a boy she would have liked to impress. In (18)
and (19), all modies both of the two separate PPs. In (20), another
utterance in the story about the young woman outside the convenience
store, the locative deictic there and the following VP are modied by all.

ALL + PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE

All appears with scope over locative PPs, manner PPs, and idiomatic PPs, as
exemplied in (21)(23), respectively. (Quotative use of all in these examples will be examined in the next section.)

A New all in Conversation

131

21. Yesterday, Francisco and Michelle were all by the lockers, and Francisco was all, Why didnt you call me back yesterday? and Michelle was
all, Because my mom was trippin. And Francisco was all, Well, why
have you been ignoring me? And Michelle was all, Because.
22. Are you 3 all into school now that you moved away?
23. And shes all in my face and all [facial expression of anger], you know
what I mean?

The quantier all is allowed only before PPs headed by of (e.g., All of the
paintings sold). In contrast, new discourse all appears before a wide range of
prepositions. The quantier all would be ungrammatical with scope over
the following PPs in each of the examples in (21)(23).4

ALL + NOUN PHRASE AND ALL + SENTENCE

In only 2 examples out of 160 did all precede an NP or an S. (An
explanation of the paucity of these syntactic types follows.) The example of
an NP is provided in (24) and the one of an S is in (25).
24. Shes all this big English woman.
25. I hate it when Im all my butt hangs off the chair.

In (24), the speaker is relating the story of getting a new apartment and
describing his landlord. All is used in (24) with scope over a single count
NP. The quantier all cannot be used with single count NPs in this dialect.5
In (25), the speaker uses the S after all to describe herself in certain
situations. The quantier all would be ungrammatical in (25), as it cannot
have scope over S.
Thus, the new use of all is documented in a wide variety of syntactic
contexts which would not allow the quantier all. In the following section,
one more environment is added to the set: all introducing direct and
constructed dialogue.

QUOTATIVE ALL
Sixty-eight percent of the examples of all in the corpus are quotatives, many
of which introduce either direct speech or constructed speech in a story.
Examples of all used as quotatives for single instances of direct speech in a
story are provided in (26)(30).
26. So Im just all, Can you just tell me how much our bill was?

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american speech 76.2 (2001)

27. Im all, Stop! Stop!
28. I was talking to Troi yesterday, and shes all, Go to UTits a great
school!
29. I said something funny, and hes all, Write that down!
30. Shes all, Make sure you look behind you before you go to the ATM.

In (26)(30), quotative all is used to introduce the reported dialogue of the

original speaker, but in the voice and manner of the current speaker. In
(26) and (27), the speaker reports his or her own speech. In (26), the
speaker is telling her friend about her ght with the phone company over
her phone bill. Example (27) occurs in a story about a girl on her bicycle
about to crash into the speaker.
In (28)(30), the speaker is quoting some other individual. In (28), the
speaker is quoting one of the linguistics professors at San Francisco State
giving her advice about graduate programs in linguistics. In (29), the
quotation is from the speakers boyfriend. Example (30) is part of a story
told by a young man getting a new apartment in a rough neighborhood and
the advice his new landlord gave him.
All as a quotative is also used to mimic the original speaker, in which
case the quality of the speakers voice changes to approximate the voice of
the individual in the story uttering the quotation. Examples of all used for
imitative presentation are provided in (31)(33).
31. Hes all [whining voice], Tell me you like it.
32. Im a dispatcher, so Im all, Number 304 [miming talking into a
microphone].
33. My eld supervisor was all [changes into voice of supervisor], This sort
of work can be draining emotionally.

In (31)(33), the voice quality of the individual speaking in the story is

approximated by the speaker. In (31), a young woman on the bus is telling
her friend about her boyfriends behavior after he purchased a sweater. She
performs her boyfriends words in a whining, croaky voice. In (32), the
speaker imitates her own voice when she makes announcements over a
microphone in her job as a taxi dispatcher, and in (33), the speaker imitates
her supervisors voice in a stor y about her community volunteer work.
All is also used for strings of quotatives in a story. The quotations may
be, but need not be, from the same speaker, as shown in (21) above, and
also in (34) and (35).
34. So then Im all, I was surprised by my grade. And hes [the professor]
all, Well, its obvious that you didnt study. And Im all, I know, Ive
been really busy.

A New all in Conversation

133

35. And so hes all, NO, Im not getting out of the car. And then I was all,
Well, could you please give him a message for me please? Hes all,
What? Im all, Tell him to leave Mary alone. And hes all, OK. And
hes all, Well, Im supposed to give YOU a message. And I was all,
Whatever!

In (34), the individual whose dialogue is introduced by all changes with

each new quotation. In (35), the individual whose dialogue is quoted
changes in the rst four quotations but remains the same in the fth and
sixth.
Often, all is used to introduce constructed, rather than actual, dialogue, as shown in (36) and (37).
36. Thank you! Im all, Oh NO!
37. Look the dogs all, Wooooo.

In (36), the speaker is describing her mental state, rather than quoting her
actual utterance. The incident took place in the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant, where the speaker had asked the occupant of the next stall
for some toilet paper. She uttered (36) after being handed the extra roll
from the next stall. She did not actually say, Oh NO! in the discourse but
used the constructed quotation to describe her reaction when she found
that her stall had no toilet paper. In (37), the speaker and his girlfriend
were walking their dog in the park, and the boyfriend pointed to a drawing
of a dog on the pooper-scooper bag dispenser. Here, in constructed speech,
the speaker puts himself in the place of a dog in a drawing and imagines
what such a dog might be saying.
All is also used to imitate actual or constructed nonverbal behavior.
The examples in (38)(41) show all introducing body positions and/or
gestures.
38. Im speeding down the hill, and I dont know how to stop, and Im all
[ails arms with terried expression].
39. Did you see when we walked into that bar last night? Everyone was all
[hand raised at chest level with palm out].
40. Yeah, shes all [facial and body gestures denoting primped up], but Im
prettier.
41. Youre all [lifts leg like dog urinating on cus tree in apartment].

In (38), the gesture is the physical equivalent of a quotative used for actual
behavior. The speaker is imitating her body position and facial expression
during her rst in-line skating experience. In (39) and (40), the gestures
are nonverbal equivalents to lexical items, rather than imitations of any

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american speech 76.2 (2001)

actual body positions. In (41), the speaker is joking about the hearer
getting eas from her boyfriends cat and uses a leg-lifting gesture to evoke
the behavior of a generic dog. In this case, all is used to introduce constructed nonverbal behavior.

ALL AS A MARKER OF UPCOMING

UNIQUE CHARACTERIZATION
In each of the examples above, all contains the meaning of the universal
quantier, but its meaning is substantially augmented. All is used to introduce the speakers characterization of some individual or entity in a story.
The speakers use of all represents his or her unique depiction of that
individual as fully represented by a single salient property or set of properties at that time in the story. All, then, is a discourse marker that signals that
the speaker is about to introduce such a unique characterization.
The reason that most uses of all either precede APs or VPs or are
quotatives is that all introduces a unique characterization in terms of a set
of salient properties, and semantically these constituents yield sets of
properties (i.e., they would be logically represented using lambda expressions).6 The denotation of NP is typically an individual or set of individuals,
and the denotation of S is a truth value, not a set of properties. Moreover,
the properties represented by APs and VPs, as well as quotations, are
properties that might differ, depending on the interpretation of the observer. For example, an AP, such as totally excited in (8), represents the
speakers characterization of himself when the newest Star Wars movie was
released. In this sentence totally has scope over excited and all has scope over
the entire AP totally excited. All indicates that the speaker is about to describe
what an individual in the story was like at some particular time. His own
characterization is appropriate, because he is describing himself and the
property he is using is subjective.
A subjective property of the entity under consideration is also seen in
(13), where the VP makin faces at Ms. Johnson is a complex property being
predicated of Omar. The speaker of (13) uses all to indicate that what
follows is his interpretation of what Omar was like yesterday.
The reason that all only rarely precedes S is that, semantically, S does
not usually denote a property; it usually denotes a truth value. Example
(25), in which all has scope over S, has the unusual syntactic structure of an
entire tensed S following Im. The speaker of (25) uses a proposition to

A New all in Conversation

135

subjectively describe an individual at some particular time(s), so, although

the syntax chosen by the speaker is unusual, the use of all as a discourse
marker is unexceptional.
Because NPs typically denote sets of individuals, all only rarely precedes them. When NPs do denote properties (e.g., predicate nominatives),
they are usually not properties that change depending on the interpretation of an observer. Someone who is a dentist, for example, is a dentist to
any observer, and the speakers unique characterization would be unnecessary. Furthermore, all is used to signal that the speaker is about to give his
or her own characterization of an individual at some particular time, and
someone who is a dentist is not only a dentist at some particular time in a
story. In (24), the sole instance of all + NP, the speaker is describing his
landlord for the rst time in the story. His characterization of her as a big
English woman is his impression, and he is choosing to fully depict her by
these salient properties.
The analysis of all as a marker of unique characterization accounts for
its quotative use. The quotations, constructed dialogue, imitated nonverbal
behaviors, or constructed nonverbal behaviors are used as properties that
fully characterize some individual at some time in the story. For example, in
(32) the speaker is using all to introduce her characterization of herself
when she is at her job. The constructed discourse is an example of something she might say (as opposed to some particular utterance she actually
said), and she completes the scene by using her st as a microphone.
In (41), a constructed nonverbal behavior quotative, the speaker uses
all to introduce her playful depiction of her friend as he is complaining
about the eas in the apartment (i.e., that he is feeling like a dog). Again,
this is the speakers impression of the relevant individual, which may be
given even when that individual is present.
In sum, the analysis of all as a discourse marker introducing the
speakers unique characterization of an individual or entity in the discourse as being fully represented by some salient property or properties at
that time in the story accounts for all the data in the corpus. This analysis
unies the use of all in its disparate syntactic environments, as well as
predicting which of the environments would be expected to be rarely
found for semantic reasons. The representation of an individual as being
fully characterized by some property or properties explains why the
morpheme all is used, as it exploits the meaning of the universal quantier.
But new discourse all is different from the universal quantier in both
syntactic distribution and meaning.

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american speech 76.2 (2001)

ALL VERSUS LIKE

The speech community that uses all also uses both the noncontrastive focus
marker like (Underhill 1988; Miller and Weinert 1995) and the quotative
like (Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang 1990; Romaine and Lange 1991;
Ferrara and Bell 1995). Sometimes all and like overlap in distribution: both
can be used to precede some of the same types of constituents, and both are
used to introduce reported or constructed dialogue or nonverbal behavior.
However, all is readily distinguished from both versions of like because it
can co-occur with them, as in (42)(45).
42. He was all like in baggy jeans and a wife beater [ribbed white tank top].
43. She was all like [imitates cr ying], Why didnt you tell me that was a bad
idea?
44. So she said she couldnt pick me up and I was all like, Whatever.
45. And she was all like [facial expression of boredom, rolling eyes].

In (42), the noncontrastive focus marker like is used to draw attention

to the mans attire. All is used as well, to signal that this man is being fully
described by the property of wearing this attire. In (43)(45), like is a
quotative for an actual utterance, a constructed utterance, and a physical
gesture, respectively. Like introduces the reported speech or nonverbal
behavior, and all introduces the speakers unique characterization of the
individual responsible for the reported speech or gesture. Like in (43)
(45) is equivalent to the verb say(ing), which could be substituted for like in
these examples. All gives more information than just that reported speech
is upcoming; it signals that the speakers impression of some individual in
the discourse is upcoming and that that individual will be fully characterized by the particular property represented by the reported speech or
nonverbal behavior.
Furthermore, several environments in which like is used would be
inappropriate contexts for all. Example (46) is taken from Underhill
(1988, example 29):
46. [referring to pens] Dont you have like a red one?

My analysis predicts that (47), analogous to (46), would not occur.

47. [referring to pens] *Dont you have all a red one?

The syntactic structure of the scope of all in (47) is an NP similar to that of

(25), this big English woman (number of adjectives is irrelevant to the
construction). But a red pen is a red pen to any observer, so all would not be
used, because all introduces a unique characterization.

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137

It is not the inanimacy of the NP in (47) that blocks all. Consider (48),
said in a San Francisco tattoo parlor.
48. . . . and have the water all spraying off your design.

Here, the water is depicted as having one salient property relevant to the
discussionthat it would be spraying off the tattooed design. This is the
speakers unique characterization of the water as it appears in this discourse.
Another environment in which like is used but all would be infelicitous
is given in (49).
49. I havent seen her in like two years.

In this example, the noncontrastive focus like highlights the amount of time
in the utterance. No individual or entity is being uniquely characterized
here, so all would not be used either before like or in its place in this
sentence.

CONCLUSION
My analysis of the new use of all in the casual conversation of teenagers and
young adults in San Francisco provides a unied account for all of the
obser ved data and predicts infelicitous environments for this construction.
All introduces salient properties described by VPs, APs, PPs, and even
an NP and an S, as well as reported speech, constructed speech, reported
nonverbal behavior, and constructed nonverbal behavior. Given that all
signals the speakers unique characterization of some individual or entity
in the discourse, it is not surprising that all often appears in emotionally
charged stories in which the speakers particular interpretation of characters and events is crucial.

NOTES
This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of
the International Linguistics Association. I would like to thank Liz Schuler and
students in my Linguistics 420 and Semantics 719 classes for their assistance in data
collection.
1.

See Ferrara and Bell (1995) and Dailey-OCain (2000) for sociolinguistic
treatments of like. Sociolinguistic investigation of all has yet to be carried out.

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2.
3.
4.
5.

6.

american speech 76.2 (2001)

The scope of all was determined by context and intonation in the discourse.
The addressee is a single individual in this discourse.
Note that the constituent modied in each of these examples is the PP and not
the subject NP. As mentioned above, all does not allow Q-oat.
An anonymous reviewer points out that some Midland dialects use all with
single countable NPs, as in Hes all the [the only] brother I have. Note that the
meaning of the new all is not equivalent to the only in (24); it is an
introduction of this womans salient characteristics.
The lambda operator is used in formal semantics to express a set of complex
properties. A typical lambda expression such as x[] (where is a wellformed formula) is translated as the property of being an x such that . As all
is proposed to uniquely characterize an individual as a particular set of salient
properties, the lambda expression would straightforwardly capture its semantics.

REFERENCES
Blyth, Carl, Jr., Sigrid Recktenwald, and Jenny Wang. 1990. Im Like, Say What?!:
A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative. American Speech 65: 21527.
Dailey-OCain, Jennifer. 2000. The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Attitudes
toward Focuser like and Quotative like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 6080.
Ferrara, Kathleen, and Barbara Bell. 1995. Sociolinguistic Variation and Discourse Function of Constructed Dialogue Introducers: The Case of be + like.
American Speech 70: 26590.
Miller, J., and R. Weinert. 1995. The Function of LIKE in Dialogue. Journal of
Pragmatics 23: 36593.
Romaine, Suzanne, and Deborah Lange. 1991. The Use of like as a Marker of
Reported Speech and Thought: A Case of Grammaticalization in Progress.
American Speech 66: 22779.
Underhill, Robert. 1988. Like Is, Like, Focus. American Speech 63: 23446.

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