"There's a phenomenon that has interested me for a while, and I noticed a extreme example last weekend. When people mean "yes" they sometimes say "no, yeah" or "yeah, no" and when they mean "no" they say "yeah, no" or "no, yeah" or even "no, yeah, no."
After laying out some boringish data about this linguistic tic -- including the semi-interesting fact that it's apparently really common in Australia -- the post's author Mark Liberman gives a really clear and sensible analysis of this linguistic phenomenon.
Read all the details after the button pressy thingy, including a hot picture of a TOTALLY SHIRTLESS GUY!
Yeah, no I meant it!
To resume...
"An example from the conversational corpus where both yeah and no are independently appropriate, so that the combination is arguably just compositional:
A: yeah so what do you buy what are you looking for you look for an automatic you know you look for something with all the
B: yes i can't drive a standard
A: you can't drive a standard
B: no i can't drive a standard
A: yeah no i used to when i was when i was uh younger
B: uh-huh
A: you know but i've it's been long gone out of my system now i could just put it in home and let it go there and take me there and that's it i don't like any of thatHere it seems to me that in A's "yeah no", the yeah acknowledges B's contribution (and perhaps indicates sympathy or agreement with it), while the no answers the (unasked) question "how about you, can you drive a standard?".
Sometimes the functions of the yeah and no are more obscure, as in this passage from a different conversation, where A and B are engaged in some meta-conversation about why they signed up for the study:
B: it seems i know people in a
like my sister does r- related research and that's why she forwarded it to me and i was like okay i'll support the cause you know i uh
A: yeah no i think it's great and my my sister in the in her psych program is always like
talking about all these studies that she's doing you know for all her friends who are doing like more
like she's had like
forty seven thousand m._r._i.'s because she has a lot of studies that are doing likeBut in all the cases that I looked at, the yeah and the no seem be independently appropriate in the context of use, even if the sequence seems surprising when viewed in merely semantic terms.
In cases like the last one, "yeah no" covers all the interactional bases -- it acknowledges the interlocutor and (ambiguously) suggests agreement, while simultaneously (and ambiguously) indicating novelty in the form of divergence from (perhaps shared) presuppositions or expectations.
Maybe this protean little phrase is so useful that some people become addicted to it, and for them it becomes lexicalized as a unitary discourse marker simply indicating that an opinion follows, or something of the sort."I particularly like how the author captures the essentially kind, sympathetic nature of the "yeah, no" and "no, yeah" construction, how it is generally used as a means of softening conversational disagreement or divergence. But as someone who is almost pathologically polite, I may be overvaluing the tools in my arsenal.
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