> すごく背が低いけれど、いつも堂々とした態度で、颯爽とした雰囲気がある。
>
> そして――‥‥彼女は僕の彼女だったりする。

What exactly is the meaning of "だったりする" here? I've read in A Dictionary of
Basic Japanese Grammar by Seiichi Makino that when たり is used with adjectives
and nouns, it means "sometimes". Accordingly, when I first read the above
line, I understood the part in question as "She is sometimes my girlfriend(and
sometimes not)". Is that the correct interpretation? From context, it doesn't
feel like it is so. Is there another way of understanding "だったりする"?
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2013-12-13T22:40:03.833
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question
grammar meaning
Meaning of noun + だったりする
Without further context, 「彼女は僕の彼女だったりする。」 can mean one of two different
things. However, "She is sometimes my girlfriend (and sometimes not)" is NOT
one of them.

The two possible meanings are:

  1. "She happens to be my girlfriend (in reality)." and

  2. "She happens to be my girlfriend (in my wild imagination)."

Unless the larger context was something very unusual, I really could not think
of another meaning as a Japanese speaker. In either of the two meanings above,
だったりする is being used for its new informal usage/meaning "to happen to be";
therefore, I do not think Japanese-as-a-foreign-language textbooks would cover
it. In real life in Japan, it has been in fairly heavy use among the younger
generations for the last 15-20 years.
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answer