This article investigates the effect of the external variables speaker age and sex on the use of the quotatives be like, go, be all, and say in present-day spoken American English. The study is based on a large computerized corpus of naturally-occurring conversation collected from a wide range of speakers across the United States. The results show that there are striking differences in the way that men and women under the age of forty use these quotatives. Young women are in the lead in the use of be like, but the use of this quotative decreases dramatically among women in their late 20s and in their 30s. In contrast, the use of be like increases among men in their late 20s. The patterns of use described here represent a departure from previous findings and suggest that the effect of speaker’s age and sex on quotative use is more complex than has been posited so far.
2020. Sociolinguistic Variation in Intensifier Usage in Indian and British English. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 47 ff.
Sayers, Dave
2014. The mediated innovation model: A framework for researching media influence in language change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Cukor-Avila, Patricia
2012. Some structural consequences of diffusion. Language in Society 41:5 ► pp. 615 ff.
Buchstaller, Isabelle, John R. Rickford, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Thomas Wasow & Arnold Zwicky
2010. The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across spoken and internet newsgroup data. Language Variation and Change 22:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2010. Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study. Journal of English Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
Buchstaller, Isabelle & Alexandra D'Arcy
2009. Localized globalization: A multi‐local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like1. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13:3 ► pp. 291 ff.
KOHN, MARY ELIZABETH & HANNAH ASKIN FRANZ
2009. Localized Patterns for Global Variants: The Case of Quotative Systems of African American and Latino Speakers. American Speech 84:3 ► pp. 259 ff.
Barbieri, Federica
2008. Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:1 ► pp. 58 ff.
Barbieri, Federica & Suzanne E.B. Eckhardt
2007. Applying corpus-based findings to form-focused instruction: The case of reported speech. Language Teaching Research 11:3 ► pp. 319 ff.
D'Arcy, Alexandra
2007. LIKEAND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY: DISENTANGLING FACT FROM FICTION. American Speech 82:4 ► pp. 386 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
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