As I was skimming through the language log, I found an entry that caught my eye. It was “yeah no” by Mark Liberman. He discusses how people often say “yeah no” when answering questions. His example is, “Did you like Columbia?” “Yeah no I loved it.” The entry talks mostly about who uses this statement most. However, this is not he aspect I found to be most interesting. There was something that really surprised me. While I was reading the article I had the notion in my head that, “well, obviously people say ‘yeah no’ sometimes, when they are answering questions like: ‘Did you not like that food.’” The yeah is in immediate response, in an effort to quickly let the asker know that you did like the food, and the no is to indicate that there statement was wrong. As I read more of the blog entry I found my assumption was entirely off.
I kept telling myself that these speakers, using “yeah no” were incorrect, that they should just be saying one or the other, for example, “No, I did like that food.” I was wrong however. As Liberman explains, “Here both yeah and no are independently appropriate – ‘yeah I loved it’ because the basic answer to the question is positive, and ‘no I loved it’ because love is being contrastively substituted for like. This may seem like a weird thing to blog about. I just thought it was interesting that for my last assignment for this class I was reminded one more time that I do not understand language. There are many misconception surrounding language and even after taking this class I am not immune to misconceiving.