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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 41:3 (2020) ► pp.325–351

Another story

Be like across discourse types

| The University of Western Australia
| The University of Western Australia
| The University of Western Australia

Quotative be like has been described as “one of the most striking developments [in English]” (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004: 493). Despite the vast research on quotatives and the upsurge of be like, the potential impact of discourse type on the grammar of quotation has rarely been assessed. Yet, discourse type has proved a relevant factor in linguistic variation (see Travis 2007; Buchstaller 2011; Travis and Lindstrom 2016). Drawing on vernacular spoken data from our multigenerational corpus of Australian English, we include discourse type as a predictor in our recursive partitioning and logistic regression models. Our results show that similar linguistic constraints operate on be like across discourse types. However, significant differences emerge regarding its social conditioning in narrative as opposed to non-narrative discourse, pointing to a strong association between be like and female storytelling.

Keywords: be like , quotation, discourse type, narrative, language variation and change, Australian English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse type and quotation
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Narrative
    • 3.2Defining and operationalizing discourse type
    • 3.3Circumscribing the variable context
    • 3.4Social and linguistic factors
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Trees and forests
    • 4.2Mixed-effects modelling
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00053.rod
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