270 What’s More and Whatever
argument where continuation could damage the relationship between partici-
pants” (610). In the example given, one participant abruptly brings an argument
to an end by saying “Whatever. New topic.” As seen in the OED defi nition, this
argument- stopping function is part of whatever ’s meaning.
Benus , Gravano , and Hirschberg ( 2007 ) are concerned with the prosody of
the pragmatic marker whatever. They note that it is used to express a range
of emotions from neutral to (three degrees of) negative emotion, but never
positive emotion. It may also signal a wish to terminate the current discourse
segment (2629). In both production and perception studies, they found that
prosody linked with negativity: The more negative the use, the more likely it
was for the fi rst syllable of whatever to carry pitch accent, the more extended
the duration of articulation of the word, and the more expanded the pitch range
(2630, 2632).^14 In fact, they conclude that the degree of negativity can be pre-
dicted “solely from the prosody of individual hot- spot words such as what-
ever ” (2632). They point out (2629) that the negative meaning develops from
the “indifference” meaning of the modifi er usage (e.g., pick whatever apple
you want ) combined with prosody.^15
The pragmatic marker whatever is the subject of a number of online dis-
cussions. These are the result, in part, of polls by the Marist Institute of
Public Opinion^16 that found whatever to be the “most annoying” word among
Americans from 2008 to 2014. The interviewees were asked to rank whatever
in comparison to a fairly randomly selected set of other pragmatic markers
( like , you know (what I mean) , just sayin’ , gotcha , literally , anyway , awesome )
and popular expressions ( twitterverse , no worries , no offense , but , huge , obvi-
ously , seriously , to tell you the truth , it is what it is , at the end of the day ), which
changed from year to year.^17 This poll has been rightly criticized because the
list was not open- ended, as noted by Zimmer ( 2009a ), who observes: “it’s not
like half of Americans are really tearing their hair out about whatever. ” Also,
whatever is the only word except for like that appears on every year’s list.
14 In some cases, whatever has a very fl at pitch contour, but this is associated with lack of interest
or boredom, which are likewise rated as negative (Benus et al. 2007: 2631).
15 Von Fintel (2000) postulates two meanings for whatever : “speaker ignorance” (as in There’s
a lot of garlic in whatever Arlo is cooking ) and “indifference” (as in I grabbed whatever tool
was handy ). He suggests that ignorance and indifference converge in free- choice imperatives
such as Pick whatever apple you want (35), where the speaker doesn’t know which apple the
hearer wants and the speaker is giving the hearer a free hand in selecting whichever apple she
or he wants.
16 The institute is a survey research center located at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York,
which conducts polls on a variety of social and political topics (see http:// maristpoll.marist
.edu/ about/ ). In this case, telephone polls were conducted with approximately 1,500 Americans
from various regions and different education levels, ages, races, genders, and household
incomes. Detailed results of the polls are available on the website.
17 The words are chosen by members of the polling institute: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=h2Vi3NAzQSY (accessed June 20, 2016).