No, yeah
Last night I was walking home from dinner with a friend of mine, and we passed by the building where we work together. He was heading up to do some work, but I was just going to go home. My friend asked me if I would be going up for a bit, to which I replied,
No, yep. (I have some homework to do)(I meant to say the stuff in the parentheses, but I got something caught in my throat so it never actually got vocalized.) Now, coincidentally, me and this friend of mine have been wondering casually about exactly what the phrase yeah, no means. We hadn’t realized that “no, yeah” was also possible. Being the form-conscious linguist that I am, I immediately started introspecting to figure out why I said no, yeah. The first answer I came up with was an attempt to work it into our current hypotheses about yeah, no, namely that the first interjection is the “actual” response, while the second is a response to a sort of implicit, opposing viewpoint. This would come out to me conveying “no I’m not going up, and yes (oh implicit opposing viewpoint) it is true that I am not going up.” But this didn’t seem right at all. My best guess at the time (and still now) is that the yep was a self-directed response to an implicit self-directed question of “is it true that what I just said is correct?” Of course, this could be the sort of self-directed speech that is mostly for the purpose of others to hear. Another potential example is from a Ray Romano interview (I invite you to search for “no, yeah” and analyze for yourself). Ah, but other uses of no, yeah appear all over. One example from an interview of golf player Mike Reid:
MIKE REID: Yeah, you know, you just look at opportunities like that and you hope you can setup more like that. But you just have to play them one at a time. It’s pretty unromantic, but that’s what you have to do, I think. Q. Is this a philosophy you’ve just come to later in your career or you’ve always been this kind of relaxed and so on? MIKE REID: Well, I look relaxed, but, no, yeah, I guess you develop it after awhile. You try to play your game and I think everybody has to play their game.This is complicated by the fact that Reid is faced with a disjunctive question. One way to read this is “no, I haven’t always been relaxed (over my whole career), yes, it is a philosophy that came to me later in my career.” Though the “no I haven’t always been relaxed, [to "self"] yeah, that’s true” reading is not imcompatible. Other readings exist too, I’m sure. Here’s another, perhaps different use:
Todd: Oh, like the, the new issue. (Yeah) Yeah, the first draft, or whatever. Kawabe: Yeah, and then he had to finish that one like until that day, so [snip] And then he goes back and I wait and I just kept waiting from the door and actually, four hours later, he gave me the manga. Todd: Really! (Yeah!) Did you read it on the way? Kawabe:
No, yeah, I was really tempted but I couldn’t do that, and yeah, I brought that to the publishing company. That was so funny!I’m not entirely sure what the yeah is doing for the sentence in this case, but my best guess is that it is corresponding to the implicit “dude, you totally have the desire to read that thing, huh?!?” that is implicit in the conversation. The yeah no and no yeah are common enough targets for those who decry “meaningless” bits of conversation: here is one sample. Finally, as a preview to a discussion of yeah, no, some instances from interviews with famous American tennis players.
Q. Four years ago you hadn’t won a Grand Slam title. In four years’ time, you have nine. You’re out on the court today during the ceremony and described as the greatest player to have ever played the game on the PA system. That’s remarkable to have that mantle in four years’ time. ROGER FEDERER: Yeah, no, I totally agree. That’s where you see how much I struggled, too, you know. Early on in my career, I couldn’t win the Masters Series, couldn’t win the Slams, was struggling to win other titles.
And in another interview:
Q. I’m sure you’re very relieved to get it over and done with tonight when your next opponents have to come back tomorrow? ANDY RODDICK: Yeah, absolutely, if you would have asked when I went on who was gonna finish, who wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t have picked this scenario for you. I don’t know if I was too thrilled when they decided to go on at a little after 7:30. I’m glad they put me on now. Q. Looking ahead to your opponents, obviously Andy Murray could be one. Could you talk about him, how you think it will go. ANDY RODDICK: Against Murray? Q. Yeah. ANDY RODDICK: Yeah, no, he’s a good player. He’s got a great feel for the game. He hits a lot of dropshots. He competes pretty well. He does everything pretty well. So he makes you beat him, which is tough.
Q. You haven’t played Youzhny in quite a while. I think you’re 1‑2 against him. What are your thoughts of him as a challenge? ANDY RODDICK: Yeah, no, he’s tough. I mean, I think he was up around Top 15 for the better part of the last, you know, year, year and a half.
Whoah, this is awesome. I say both of these all the time (and they often go with “that’s right,” as in “Yeah, no, that’s right,” or “No, yeah, that’s right”). I am sitting here trying to think of what distinguishes the two when I use them, and it’s tricky. I think it is context-specific (what isn’t, of course), because which one comes first and which one carries the intended meaning depends on what it’s responding to. So in the first quote (Mike Reid), the “no” seems to be cutting himself off from his first thought and getting himself on track to start a second one. “No” often acts transitionally between clauses like this, I’ve noticed: “I was going to go to the store yesterday but no, (yeah,) I’m going downtown today” or “Well, E.coli is proving difficult to deal with, but no, (yeah,) the FDA is a terrific organization.” It somehow indicates that what you were saying isn’t really what you were meaning to say, and lets you redirect yourself, and then start out the new thought with “yeah.” In your example, “yeah” might perform similarly to switch thoughts (you were going to say “yeah that’s right I have homework”), except that your “no” is actually a “no” of negation. Maybe in your example it’s the introductory (though it didn’t end up getting to introduce anything) “yeah” that’s important.
Also? It could just be a hedgy discourse marker.
Check Language hjat: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001395.php
and
BURRIDGE, KATE and FLOREY, MARGARET. 2002. ‘Yeah-no he’s a good kid’: A discourse analysis of yeah-no in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 22.149-71.
Jane: thanks so much for the link and article! The latter has a lot of interesting cases, though as usual I’m left feeling a little empty by the conversation analysis sort of explanation. And it’s interesting (and a little disappointing ;-p) that several commenters on the Hat’s article also got the same sort of generalization that me and my friend got for “yeah, no.” One said, “It’s kind of a dramatic device, anticipating an imaginary objection from the audience.” And also John Hardy’s “the ‘yeah’ is to acknowledge the possible validity of the other person’s remark, the ‘no’ to deflect its implications.” Hmm…I’ll have to look for more different uses of “yeah no/no yeah”, or find counter examples. =)
PC: hmm, I hadn’t considered the possibility of cutting one’s self off, or perhaps doing a sort of hedgy back-off. It certainly seems that way in some cases, though. Actually, the article in the AJOL says that one use of “yeah no” is a sort of “return to original topic” marker, which I think might be compatible with a sort of backtracking/cutting off function…maybe. I think I’ll have to write up a paper on this; that’s the only way I can motivate myself to try and figure everything out. (as though that’s ever possible in linguistics)
[...] has “also too”? What about “and but” or “also but”? What about “no yeah”? What about “and so” or “so but”? I have all of these. Hell, I think I even [...]