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I believe in recent years people are more likely to answer questions by repeating the verb than by just saying e.g. "yes" or "yes I am" For example "Are you going out for lunch?" "I am." In my memory , decades ago on the east coast (U.S.) we reserved this pattern for strong contradiction: "How come you didn't eat your vegetables?" "I did!" To be honest I find it a bit irritating, like the person is putting on airs or trying to sound Irish. Or subtly mocking my question: "Are you going home for the holidays?" "I am going home for the holidays." Anyway I'm no linguist-I'm just curious as to whether anyone else has noticed a trend. All I can find online is that it's referred to as "echo answering."

Dave
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  • unh-unh. nope. naw. – StoneyB on hiatus Jan 19 '17 at 20:16
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    People "notice" lots of things that aren't actually true. As far as I know, there hasn't been a controlled (corpus) study that indicates an increase in that pattern in some context. Perhaps there has been an increase in politeness and people now go beyond perfunctory "hmph" for an affirmative reply. – user6726 Jan 19 '17 at 21:54
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    Any time you think to your self "that aspect of language sounds new" your next thought should be to remember the recency illusion. Then go check some corpora to see what evidence there is. – curiousdannii Jan 20 '17 at 05:32
  • This may be more fitting on [english.se] – Sir Cornflakes Jan 20 '17 at 10:47
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    On the one hand this seems awfully broad, since there are many ways one could echo. However, if you picked some very particular phrases, you can really see the change infrequency over time with Google NGrams – Mitch Jan 21 '17 at 21:07
  • Interesting idea Mitch. I tried but I couldn't figure out how to enter the phrases to isolate them in this context. For example "I am not" could be an answer to a question, but it could just be the start of any sentence. – Dave Jan 22 '17 at 13:14

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