Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context

Eight hundred years of LIKE

Editor

Alexandra D’Arcy

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027259523 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027265319 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 187] 2017. xx, 235 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 September 2017

https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.187

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements | pp. xiii–xiv

List of figures
List of tables

Abbreviations | pp. xix–xx

Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–33

Chapter 2. Empirical context | pp. 35–45

Chapter 3. Historical context | pp. 47–66

Chapter 4. Developmental context | pp. 67–116

Chapter 5. Social context | pp. 117–123

Chapter 6. Ideological context | pp. 125–147

Chapter 7. Contextual interfaces | pp. 149–175

Appendix. Anthology of like | pp. 201–232

Index | pp. 233–235

“A treasure trove of illustrative examples and insightful analyses of that ubiquitous, pesky, little element like in all its different guises and a must-read for all researchers interested in discourse-pragmatic variation.”

Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich

“With this book, Alexandra D’Arcy has produced the definitive reference work on like. Pulling together decades of research, she teases apart like’s many functions and weaves together their histories to draw a rich, multi-layered picture of how the word has systematically expanded its functional scope over centuries. Along the way, the book usefully tackles myth after myth about the newness, ‘wrongness,’ femaleness, and randomness of like, a word that has so captured the popular imagination.”

Anne Curzan, University of Michigan

“Alexandra D’Arcy has written an impressive and highly readable account of like based on an exceptionally rich set of historical and contemporary vernacular spoken data. With anexemplary clarity of prose and a conscientious approach to empirical data, the author sheds fresh light on diachrony and patterns of synchronic variation, convincingly detailing the developmental cline of the discourse marker and discourse particle and providing accurate timing of the emergence of new functions and contexts of use. This is certainly among the most enlightening work on like that I have read. Truly fascinating and a joy to read.”

Gisle Andersen, NHH Norwegian School of Economics

“Even so, the book as a whole is thorough and efficient. It acknowledges and describes many forms of ''like'', but analyses two specific forms in depth. The analysis draws on a large set of corpora that cover a relatively long time-span and many anglophone regions. These corpora, the methods of analysing the data, and the reasoning behind this method are described in useful detail. This extends to the grammatical frames that D'Arcy takes as the basis of comparison. These are based in generative analyses which are precise, but are made transparent for those readers who are not familiar with generative grammar (especially functional projections such as nP). This means the analysis is focused and can be followed, and I would not hesitate to recommend this book to students working on ''like'' or on similar discourse-pragmatic forms.[...] D'Arcy may not want to become ''The LIKE Person'' (as she writes in the foreword), but ''Discourse-pragmatic variation in context'' is ''The LIKE Book''.”

Daniel Bürkle, University of Central Lancashire, on Linguist List 29.3236

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