What does “alright” mean at the end of a sentence?
a. Descriptive value for a foreign product can not be guaranteed. Life has no meaning and that is like a broomstick. As a human being, it has no meanings, what do you think?
What does an “alright” mean in the sentence above? I don’t know what to ask in a dictionary. Please help!
Is there any ‘natural’ way to give you the best of both worlds?
In the context you present, the ‘alright’ could connote two slightly different perspectives, depending on how the sentence is spoken.
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When the utterance is emphatic, it is an expression of sadness — the equivalent of something like “Life has no meaning, as any fool can see! In
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some places, it sounds like an acknowledgment of the correctness of an assertion made by the speaker’s interlocutor: “Indeed, life has no meaning!”. A word spoken in a slow, deliberate way in a more measured tone. “.
It is listed in several dictionaries here, but in fairness not all of them list the sense it is used in in this case, so I could see how you might have missed it.
Its a colloquial use (and so not found everywhere, and so not considered correct by everyone, and not appropriate for formal use) that serves to emphasise a previous assertion.
You can consider it equivalent to “without doubt”, indubitably, surely, etc. Frequently people whose dialect is such that they don’t use it have another expression they do use, like “for sure”.
As William points out in a comment, it would be common to set off the interjection with a comma.
Life has no meaning, alright.
Which in itself helps prove that “life doesn’t have any meaning” stands as a clause of its
own.
