Another story
Be like across discourse types
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.
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
References (58)
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