From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project comes Gen Z constructions: an overview:
The goal of this page is to provide a brief, preliminary description of some Gen Z constructions that YGDP researchers are currently investigating. The judgments on this page are mostly from the respective researchers’ own intuition; little to no data has been formally collected as of yet. The YGDP hopes to continue working on these constructions to eventually understand them better and publish individual phenomenon pages for each one.
So far, they’ve got discussions of It’s giving (“It’s giving librarian”), Lonely transitives (“I have an apple. Do you want?”), Response particle bet (“Speaker A: I just ordered us a pizza. Speaker B: Bet.”), and Spotlight not (“Not me going to Starbucks for the second time today”). This is the kind of thing more linguistics departments should be doing.
I’m fairly sure some of the lonely transitives predate Gen Z – in particular I’ve heard phrases like “You want?” for quite some time now. Maybe they’re just more widespread or acceptable now?
Is the equivalent of that “lonely transitive” construction (omitting an explicit direct-object pronoun) standard or common in some other language that could be the source of a calque?
Another one: “Because reasons.” Where you’re telling a story, and going into the reasons for something would be a digression.
See also this video (labeled as Gen Z slang, but the speaker says it’s Gen Alpha).
“Do you want?” is ungrammatical for me but when I imagine it said it’s got an Indian accent. Another case of English absorbing features from the former colonies? Or am I full of shit as usual?
Yes, “You want?” feels familiar, but I think that’s a coincidence — this is a genuinely new usage, as you can see from the other examples:
b. Speaker A: ‘Do you need a key?’
Speaker B: ‘No, I have.’
c. I forgot my wallet. Do I need?
See, for me “do you want?” gives a very vague (and quite possibly unreliable!) sense of being spoken by someone with the sort of stereotypical NYC accent that carries an implicature of Yiddish-speaking grandparents. Which is why I asked re potential calquing.
Lonely transitive want is much older than this. (“Do not want,” as a meme is a little more than twenty years old, but actual idiomatic usages of objectless want certainly predate Revenge of the Sith.) However, if young people are using the same kind of construction with other verbs, that’s more novel.
Such lonely transitives are unremarkable in vernacular German: Brauchste ? Haste schon ? ….
The way English words are shortened nowadays reminds me strongly of French practice (the first example I encountered decades ago was “pub” for “publicité”.)
situation > sitch
session > sesh
Didn’t use to work quite so massively as that, I think.
There are a shit ton of other examples that I can’t recall on the instant.
Wiktionary has a 1944 example of “sesh” in the sense “A period of sustained social drinking or recreational drug taking.” That’s supposedly a British/Irish sense. They don’t have dated examples for the related-if-narrrower AmEng sense “A period of sustained cannabis smoking,” but I’m fairly sure I heard it back in the 1980’s.
—
1864, William T. Sherman, The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Vol. II., Part 4
This is true, for Mrs. Sherman has an idea that St. Louis is unhealthy for our children, and because most of the Catholics here are tainted with the old secesh feeling.
—
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/secesh
You can do the “lonely transitive” thing ad lib in Kusaal:
Fʋ mɔr saafibiig laa?
you have key the.POLAR-QUESTION
Ɛɛn, m mɔr.
yes I have
(Mɔr “have” is always transitive.)
It’s always anaphoric, so the last example means “Yes, I have it” and would be ungrammatical in a context where there was nothing to be anaphoric to. Judging by the examples at the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, this new-fangled English construction is pretty similar, though it seems to be able to refer to vaguer antecedents than would be cromulent in Kusaal.
The existence of this construction in Kusaal perhaps partly explains the completely erroneous statement in Anthony Agoswin Musa’s Kusaal grammar (p89) that Kusaal has no inanimate singular object pronoun. (It may be also to do with the fact that the animate/inanimate distinction tends to break down in informal speech.)
Musa might want to have a word with the Bible translators. I did get all the way to Genesis 2:15 before I got to the first example of li “it” as a verb object, though:
Ka Zugsɔb Wina’am nɔk dau la niŋ Eden lɔmbɔn’ɔg la ni ye o tʋm ka gɔsidi li.
“And the Lord God put the man in the garden of Eden to work and look after it.”
You’d have thought a L1 speaker would just need to introspect a bit to avoid this kind of misstatement. Very odd.
Wiktionary has misdated the Sherman quote. His memoirs were published in 1875 (he had been busy with non-literary pursuits during 1864 …) and the particular sentence is from a apparently verbatim republishing within the memoirs of a letter he had sent in early 1868 to Ulysses Grant, vehemently opposing the President Johnson’s plan to reorganize the Army’s senior leadership to move Sherman from St. Louis to a more bureaucratic-sounding post in Washington, D.C. “Were it an order to Sitka, [or] to the Devil … I think you would not hear a whimper from me …” but Washington seemed a fate worse than death.
Note, of course, that Sherman was so consistently opposed to any sort of connection to Washington, D.C. that he lent his name to the phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shermanesque_statement by providing the locus classicus thereof.
I’ve taught a lot of Gen Z people and overheard some, and I’ve never heard any of these, except maybe a lonely transitive or two over the decades. Is it giving old person?
What generation uses “hundred percent” as a response particle?
The one I wonder about is “low key,” which my son uses quite liberally, but he will not give me any account of what it actually means, if anything. My theory is that it’s functioning roughly like the Turkish -miş- affix, to indicate an unwillingness to personally vouch for or invest in the statement. “That’s low key a good idea.” Or when pressed for an example just now: “You low key have the most random questions sometimes.”
@Martin: I think of “because reasons” (and the “because x” construction in general) as more Millennial than Gen Z, really. According to both personal memory and internet discussions, it was widespread by 2012, when the oldest Gen Zs were adults but still slightly too young to be writing for Jezebel or whatever, and the youngest were in diapers.
Now thinking of using “It’s giving” in birding, etc. Google finds only one instance of “it’s giving warbler” in identifying a bird. (There are a few comparing something to a singing group on a TV series called Glee.)
That does not extend to
which absolutely require an accusative article or pronoun in German As I Know It.
@de
How do you answer these questions in Welsh?
In Irish “an bhfuil an eochair agat?
1.Tá sí agam.
2.Tá.
3.Aye (Ulster)
would all be OK; the pronoun (1) is not obligatory. These answers would all be a bit brief, something like “fuair mè ó mo mhathair í” (= I got it from my Ma), would normally be tacked on, and maybe an adverb between, e.g., buíochas le Dia (= thank God) or go deimhin (= certainly) and, depending on the speaker, elaborated further.
You just repeat the verb alone. Except in the past tense, when there are specific words for “yes” and “no”, and in nominal sentences, where there isn’t a verb to repeat, so there are once again specific words for “yes” and “no.”
A. Oes gen ti agoriad? (“Is with you a key?”)
B. Oes. (“Is.”)
I’ve never heard any of these
I’ve heard some from my grandsons, but they’re Gen α.
The one I wonder about is “low key,” which my son uses quite liberally
My grandsons use that one too!
“Brauchst du einen Schlüssel?” “Nöh, hab’ ich”
— seems absolutely normal colloquial German for me.
I’ve heard lonely transitives from ESL speakers of various L1s. I wouldn’t argue that it got to Gen Z from any specific immigrant community, but it makes me wonder if generic World English or stereotypical ESL speech can be a source of pleasing innovations for young EFLs to adopt.
…true, western German doesn’t seem to have what I was talking about. My dialect requires nothing less than nein, ich hab einen – but contracted to four syllables with a total of four consonants: /ˌnãɪˈhɒʋãn/. Viennese mesolect restores some of the lost consonants and the a but leaves the rest unchanged.
(Three-way distinction: /a/ auch, /ã/ ein, /ãn/ einen.)
The one I wonder about is “low key,” which my son uses quite liberally
On the train back from Boston to Portland on the Sunday of St Pat’s earlier this year, a young man sitting behind me — he got off at Exeter, home of the Phillips Academy — used ‘low key’ so much that I lost all sense of what it was supposed to mean. As in, I low-key looked for Sarah but Michelle said she was low-key studying all weekend so instead we low-key went for pizza… This went on for the whole journey. I refrained from turning around and telling the young man to low-key get off my lawn.
In my Russian head it is
Do you want [[to take and eat] it]?
rather than
Do you want [it]?
So I have doubts regarding the designation “transitives”
The exception (in [my] Russian) is the calqued expression of sexual desire. I want you. In my idiolect it is not “I want [to fuck] you”.
@David L:
Perhaps akin to the Curate’s Just: I’ve often noticed that junior church ministers, when called upon to extemporise prayers, liberally sprinkle in “just”: “and we just pray, Lord, that …”
“We low-key pray, Lord …” Yes, that seems to work.
Discourse particles …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_marker
low-key
It actually has two main meanings, which is what made it hard for my millenial brain to pin down.
“kind of” as in “Before I open the messages, I disable the activity notification so no one will know I’m low-key obsessed with a party I didn’t get to attend.”
“seriously” as in “Lowkey if you talk about any woman like this you gotta die”
*example sentences from wiktionary
@drasvi:
“Want” is certainly transitive in English: in “I want to sing”, “to sing” is the complement of “want”, just as “you” is in “I want you.”
Kusaal bɔɔd “want” is likewise always transitive. The nearest parallel to “I want to sing” is when it takes a catenative-clause complement, as in
Mam pʋ bɔɔdi basi fɔ.
I not want.LINKER abandon you.NEGATIVE
“I don’t want to leave you.”
Usually it does the Balkan-Sprachbund thing, though:
M bɔɔd ye m yʋ’ʋm.
I want that I sing
In Kusaal, too, m bɔɔdif “I want you” is a thing you’d only say to a (potential) lover, not to your grandmother (unlike m nɔŋif “I love you.”) If you say m bɔɔdif nɛ, where the focus particle nɛ puts focus on the verb word itself, you would be well advised to have sounded out your interlocutor’s feelings on the matter before being quite so forthright.
[I presume this is why Naden’s Kusaal dictionary tells us that the perfective bɔ “seek” underlying this imperfective form bɔɔd actually means “fuck.” This does not appear to be the case …]
I’ve picked up the ‘as a downtoner’ sense of “lowkey” so easily (lowkey more than any other GenZ constructions), that I’m struggling to accept Wiktionary’s “actually, seriously” gloss.
In their example and any apparently similar ones I can find, I can’t shake the feeling that “lowkey” acknowledges that what follows is exaggerated or simplistic (or perhaps German “schematic” as in the other thread), even if the sentiment expressed is more serious that “lowkey” might elsewhere imply.
What generation uses “hundred percent” as a response particle?
I associate that with Indian English. I don’t hear it as specific to any generation; but rather ‘salesman mode’ — particularly at those annoying sales booths in shopping malls. Perhaps a calque? Quora cite — mostly unhelpful.
Puts me in mind of a quote, clearly from a Yiddish speaker, in Burroughs’s “Exterminator!”: “You vant I should spit right in your face?! You vant?! You vant?! You vant?!”
I think of “because reasons” (and the “because x” construction in general) as more Millennial than Gen Z, really
I agree. It sounds almost like “Whedon Speak” to me, which would make it Gen X technically, although I believe the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanbase was mostly Millennials.
What generation uses “hundred percent” as a response particle?
Also Millennials, if the extremely popular social media shorts called “Subway Takes” are any guide.
Hundert pro has been sighted in German.
Add the fact that unstressed du after a verb loses its vowel completely, and brauchst du einen /ˈbraʊ̯xstãn/ is as short as a more northern brauchste.
Compare ‘ll being used a lot in English where German leaves the future to context: it doesn’t add a syllable.
I think that’s actually part of the other sense: “I’m trying not to make a scene here; I’m trying to quietly get the message across that you should FOADIAF. (And I’m making that explicit because it finally dawned on me that my previous hints were too subtle; but I still want to communicate in hints.)”
Hundert pro has been sighted in German.
Yes, I know people who use that a lot. And it’s been around for decades, I even know boomers who use it.
To mean “Absolutely right, I agree completely”?
ETA: @AntC: I’ve heard “hundred percent” from young people who seem to be of entirely European ancestry. I haven’t noticed it in Indian English, but I don’t have much contact with Indian English apart from one friend (of the not-long-after-independence generation).
@Vanya: Thanks.
To mean “Absolutely right, I agree completely”?
Yes
Thanks. I wonder whether we could have gotten that from German.
@DM, reminded me my own logic about English “my” (a form of “the”:)) and Russian мой, моя, моё, мои (you need them when you want to specify the possessor). And about some other such things.
I think a hundred percent has its origin, or at least its burst in popularity, in emojis. It’s one of the few that give enthusiastic affirmation.
Jackson, my sense from my kids* is that low-key is an adverb that can only be used to modify content verbs, so your sample sentences (low key is/low key have) don’t quite work. That could be different in other circles.
* By “from my kids” I of course mean “from the scorn of my kids for my mis-usages.”
My younger-Millennial, British-Caribbean partner definitely has that in their idiolect
J.W. Brewer :
In Japanese it’s very common:
彼はクラス全体の前で大声で読んだ。
– He read (it) aloud in front of the class. Japanese can be extraordinarily elliptical, giving it its reputation for ambiguity. The answer to the question “did your brother read the book could be just 読んだ :literally : “read”, no subject/object pronouns.
It’s unlikely though, I’d have thought, that Gen-Z expressions are influenced by Japanese.
To add a data point, “hundred percent” is completely unremarkable to this elder millennial, even if I’m not completely certain whether I have used it myself (chances are that I have). It’s not marked as a new turn of phrase for me the way “low-key” and “it’s giving” are.
In Russian “100% that [it is or will be so]” meant “I’m 100% sure that….” and it unremarkably derives from the language of probabilities.
I learned it as an expression of agreement from emojis (see Ryan above). Not sure if I heard it in that meaning, but likely some people say so.
______
When you read the mathematical expression “100%”, that is, “hundred hundredths” as an expression from normal language, it brings to your mind the image of completeness in a way the expression “1” doesn’t.
When you read the mathematical expression “hundred hundredths” as a mathematical expression, it does not bring to your mind the image of completeness:/
In Russian “100% that [it is or will be so]” meant “I’m 100% sure that….” and it unremarkably …
No, that’s not what we’re talking about. Any of those phrases/constructions might appear in a full sentence. Unremarkable.
It’s ‘Hundred Percent’ as the whole utterance, not even a preceding ‘One’.
The “response particle” discussed by the YGDP link is “bet,” which unlike “hundred percent” is a new one on me. I can’t immediately find the text of the Weinbach 2024 piece discussing it at length and I don’t know if that gets into etymology, but I wonder if it’s nothing more than an erosion or clipping of the longstanding response-particle (if that’s the right diagnosis) “you betcha.” Although the semantics sound a wee bit different?
Sounds like “low key” is just the new “like”? I’ve not heard it yet myself in the wild, but I’ll ask my informants among the hip and happening young if this has yet spread to Britain.
Stop press: apparently it has. My daughter says “it’s one of those that started with a genuine meaning, as in ‘lowkey i actually think michael jackson’s music sucks’ when you have an opinion that’s ‘lowkey’ as in either a mild feeling or an opinion you don’t want to express too vocally. but like ‘literally’ it now just gets used as a kind of vocal tic in all sorts of contexts”. My son adds “Haha, I used that in a work email yesterday”…
Hmm, I wonder if it’s related to the annoying use of lower case?
I wonder if it’s nothing more than an erosion or clipping of the longstanding response-particle (if that’s the right diagnosis) “you betcha.”
Almost certainly, except I would say “you bet” (of which “you betcha” is an extension).
And is “you bet” a version of “you better believe it!” or “you would be more than safe placing an each-way bet on this at your local bookmaker”?
It always seemed to me a shortened form of “You bet your life [sc. that it’s true]!”
@DE, I dunno about English “want” but Russian хочу is astonishingly polyvalent if we don’t interpret that as omission:
Want-2s in chess? (in Russian we “play IN [game]” not “play [game]”)
Want-1s to Africa.
Also the future form of “be” (imperfective future of other verbs is be.FUT [other verbs]) is also astonishingly polyvalent.
Be.FUT-2s sushi?
@DE, my idea is that there is a mechanism:
V1~~V2~~N
V1 is a verb like want, must, would (will), can that can take another verb as an argument.
V2 is a verb that can take a noun as an argument.
~~ is a link between V1 and V2 or between V2 and N. By “link” I mean (a) the perceived link in my (speaker’s) head) also (b) the form of, say, V1 seen in conjunction with V2 – if there is such a form (c) also contexts where V1 is seen in conjunction with V2
The mechanism: V1~~V2~~N > V1~ ~N.
My idea: V1~ ~N is NOT the same as V1~~N
Or in the mathematical notation (arguments in parentheses)
V1(V2(N)) > V1((N)
V1((N)) is NOT same as V1(N)
I mean, in the speaker’s head “~ ~” in
want-1s~ ~[food]-PART (I want~ ~some [food])
carries the semantics of [food] consumption. It is not the “own” semantics of “want”. Verbs of consumption often take partitive and (formal) PART can be a part of that (mental) ~.
@drasvi
I think that part of what makes these constructions work in Russian (and German) is that the parts left in carry enough grammatical information to infer the parts left out, i.e., the home in *I want home is marked as a verb-of-motion locative in Russian or German. Also I think, with want, English has some sort of constraint on the object that means that when it is not a noun or infinitive phrase, it has to be a choice between things in a discrete set (usually two members)
So
I want in/ out (to be included/ excluded)
I want up/ down (the higher or lower button to summon the lift)
I want cinnamon/chocolate (two sorts of biscuits or cakes being distributed)
Confusingly (for learners) English has both “been in” and “been to”
(comparing this “to” to “to” in Russian “want to Africa”)
Mike Chisholm’s kids’ explanations of “lowkey” sounds the most correct to me, probably unsurprisingly. But I also think the way it’s sprinkled in liberally is also a downtoner, like Jonathan D says. Compare the rarer “high-key”, which can be used as an uptoner.
Lonely transitives strike me as very New York jewish or ESL. Is there a construction in Yiddish that came over to English?
The spotlight no and giving both seem mostly used by girls and women in my limited experience. Would image-conscious high school or college boys use it as well?
“Hundred percent” as a reply of agreement is completely unremarkable to me as a millennial. There’s the related but not identical “100” and “keep it 100”, from AAVE. It’s often pronounced something like hunnert. Like a lot of Gen Z slang, I think it’s filtered down into the general populace from AAVE. You can hear it used (exaggeratedly) in this video making fun of Gen Z online slang:
https://archive.org/details/twitter-video-1042573051219595269
I first heard “bet!” in 2022 and was fascinated for it by a while. I believe it’s been discussed before in the LH comments.
I was surprised to hear it used in the 1979 movie The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (totally unambiguously the same as the modern usage), which is now the earliest citation in Green’s.
Apparently it’s from AAVE, in the 80s. What happened in 2021 (or so) to bring it to wider prominence, I don’t know.
I’m pretty sure “it’s giving” comes from drag culture. I think I first heard it in Paris Is Burning (1990, but filmed in 1987).
I first saw “Bet!” in the Hip Hop Family Tree comic which was published in 2014 but the action described was around 1980. I wasn’t sure if the dialogue was exactly authentic to those times but everything else seemed to be.