The semantics and pragmatics of demonstrational 'like': A two-tiered approach

Abstract

The English quotative system has undergone a well-documented shift, with be like and related like-quotatives becoming a major resource for introducing constructed dialogue and stance (Ferrara and Bell, 1995; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2004; Buchstaller, 2001). However, like-quotatives are not confined to reporting speech or thought; they also appear with non-communicative predicates, as in dance like “this is my last dance.” This study contributes a unified compositional analysis that accounts for this broader distribution. Drawing on empirical diagnostics, I demonstrate that these constructions split into two distinct readings: a manner-oriented reading that characterizes an event’s performance, and a content-oriented reading that characterizes a message or product. To formalize this, I propose a single operator of iconic characterization that interacts with the ontology of the embedding predicate. Building on Davidson (2015), I treat the manner reading as a direct demonstration of the event argument. For the content reading, I extend Moltmann’s (2013) theory of attitudinal objects, arguing that like targets the abstract product of the event. Finally, I contribute a pragmatic account of the “approximation” effect: following Grice (1975), I derive non-verbatimness from competition with bare quotation rather than lexical semantics. This framework resolves the tension between manner and content uses, distinguishing pragmatic non-verbatimness from tokenless iconic depiction.