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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 40:1 (2019) ► pp.54–81

Going global and sounding local

Quotative variation and change in L1 and L2 speakers of Irish (Dublin) English

| University of Melbourne
| University of Ottawa

We chart the incursion of quotative be like into Dublin English, drawing comparisons with similar developments in urban Canadian English as well as with diachronic benchmarks representing vernacular Irish English. Quantitative analysis reveals that be like is the lead variant in the quotative system used by young Dubliners and is advancing along a similar, though not identical, cline of grammaticalization to that found in urban Canadian English. We use the resultant information about the Dublin English quotative system as a baseline to assess the extent to which this system has been acquired by Polish-born L2 speakers of English differentiated in terms of target language proficiency. Comparison of the L2 quotative system with the L1 Dublin English benchmark reveals that not all L1 usage constraints are faithfully replicated by L2 speakers, indicating that the acquisition of the relevant constraints is incomplete, even in the case of advanced learners.

Keywords: quotatives, be like , variation, change, grammaticalization, second language acquisition, Irish English, Canadian English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Diachronic data
    • 2.2Synchronic data
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Theoretical framework
    • 3.2The variable context
    • 3.3Coding protocol
      • 3.3.1Social factors
      • 3.3.2Linguistic factors
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Distributional findings
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00022.dis
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