What is the modern usage of particle же?

Question

In current Internet speech, there are a lot of colloquial phrases placing this particle at the end of a phrase, mostly in topic-commentary strategies (thematic comments) like:

• Двойное отрицание же.

• Законодательство же.

• Комментарий же.

This partice seems more like emphatic clitics in other languages that always appear in an utterance-final position, while the же-particle normally, to the best of my knowledge, seldom, if ever, appears in a sentence-final position.

Since when did this usage become wide-spread?

Answer 1

All three sentences are constructed using the same transformation: what's usually written as

{pronoun} же {something}!

often becomes

{something} же!

colloquially in situations when {pronoun} can be derived from the context.

Your three sentences can be rewritten as follows to get the familiar form of these sentences with "же" used to emphasize the point that the speaker considers compelling or indisputable:

Это же двойное отрицание.

Это же законодательство.

Это же комментарий.

It is hard to translate these sentences without much context. Here is one way to do it, with a context where it would make sense:

-- Why does "не может не радоватъ" mean "makes one happy?" (Почему "не может не радовать" значит "радует"?)

-- Clearly it's a double negative. (Двойное отрицание же.)

---

> -- Why did the police release them so soon? (Почему полицейские отпустили их так быстро?)

-- That's just the legislation (for you!). (Законодательство же.)

---

> -- Why was he so rude? (Почему он так нагрубил?)

-- Oh come on, it's just a comment. (Комментарий же.)

Answer 2

Когда первый участник диалога не замечает, не видит, не обращает внимания на очевидные вещи или просто не знает, не понимает их, не реагирует на приводимые доводы, то второй собеседник может реагировать приведёнными в качестве примера фразами. Если их переформулировать, то получится примерно так:

• Но ведь это двойное отрицание!
• Как ты не поймёшь, что это определено законодательством!
• Прочти внимательно предыдущий комментарий, в нём всё доходчиво изложено!

Применение же просто позволяет вместить тот же самый смысл в очень короткую фразу.

Эта форма стала широко применяться в последние 2-3 года в связи с ростом популярности блогов, микроблогов, борд и т.п.

Answer 3

These examples sound like discussion sentences. The speaker emphasizes the statement with help of же if the opponent does not understand a thing that is obvious for the speaker. An exclamation symbol (!) should be suitable at end of each example:

• Двойное отрицание же!
• ...

This is not answer for the question Since when but may help in some way.

Answer 4

The же-particle normally, to the best of my knowledge, seldom, if ever, takes final position in a sentence.

Let's check this using the Russian National Corpus. Internet speech is very close to the spoken language. However many people aren't good at typing and tend to write shorter sentences. Anyway, let's check the Spoken corpus that contains transcripts movie scripts and magnetic tape recordings of public and private speech. I took the version of the corpus that disambiguates particles and conjunctions. Here are the results:

• 787 entries contain particle же;
• 62 entries where же is placed at the end of the sentence;
• 15 entries where же is placed after a noun.

As you can see, же is used at the end of the sentence in 8% of all cases - not so often, but not so rarely either. As for же after a noun at the end of the sentence, it looks like the manually tagged corpus is too small to show this: if there are still 8%, then out of 15 entries there should be only 1. But if searched in the disambiguated version, the amount is close to 10%.

However, if we look closely at examples of usage of же after a noun, 3 of them come before a pause:

Ну уничтожение же/ они же уничтожали те нации / которые считали низшими как бы. [Беседа в Москве // Фонд «Общественное мнение», 2003]
Какой-то процент же есть же / смотрят же. [Беседа в Москве // Фонд «Общественное мнение», 2003]
Не Лукьяненко же / или кто у нас там сельсовет в Госдуме? [Беседа в Новосибирске // Фонд «Общественное мнение», 2000]

In such cases, almost 20% of them match the pattern "комментарий же".

But if we look at the non-disambiguated corpus, the numbers are almost the same:

• 43 213 entries with the particle же;
• 3 707 entries with the particle же at the end of the sentence;
• 2 794 entries with the particle же after a noun;
• 308 entries with the particle же after a noun at the end of the sentence

So, 8.5% of the time, же is placed at the end of the sentence. If we require that the же be placed after a noun, then the number of such expressions at the end of the sentence is 11%.

Examples:

Кстати / с днём рождения! У вас сегодня день рождения же. Да? [Шаши Мартынова, Елена Лихачева. Интервью в передаче «Они сделали это» // Finam_FM, 2009]

[Сеня, муж] Командный. [Юля, жен] Начальник же. [Оля, жен] У меня был такой в детстве. [Разговоры за игрой в карты (2009)]

[Сергей] Да я про театр совершенно забыл. [Костя] Точно, театр же! Так возьми такси, может, успеешь ещё. [Карен Шахназаров и др. Исчезнувшая империя, к/ф (2008)]

[Алла, жен, 22] А как терь учиться буишь кста? [Даша, жен, 20] Дык я не учусь / практика же! [Алла, жен, 22] Везет тебе! [В гостях у подруги. Разговор московских студенток (2007)]

[Мужчина1] Я говорил / стакан и бутылка! [Мужчина2] Ну да / ну и тарелка же. [Мужчина1] Ну и… тарелка. [Городок (юмористическая передача), вып. 39-40, 49-52 (1995-1998)]

As for beginning of the usage "noun + particle at the end of the sentence". I searched in main corpus for such structure and according to this chart (you can get it by clicking "Распределение по годам" link) it looks like there's no big difference between modern usage and usage over the previous 180 years, although we currently have a local maximum of usage after the local minimum at the beginning of 2000. In fact, the global maximum is around 1910.

So it doesn't look to me like anything recently adopted.

Answer 5

Since when did this usage become wide-spread?

IIRC this usage of же become popular in Internet last 2-3 years, but in spoken language it isn't something new or modern.

Answer 6

It was always here and didn't become wide-spread lately.

What you are talking about is most likely near-image boards and Japanese (anime) -based "десу же".

Not far off from Chinese and "Internet speech".

Answer 7

There is nothing special about this usage of «же». I wouldn't be surprised if this usage dates back to prehistoric times.

It's in the final position because the verb is elided.