The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Attitudes Toward Focuser like and Quotative like

Abstract

This paper accomplishes three tasks: it considers the actual age and gender distribution of like in a corpus of informal U.S. English, compares the findings of that study with the perceived age and gender distribution as determined by a questionnaire study and a matched‐guise study, and analyzes specific sociolinguistic stereotypes associated with this usage. It is found that younger people use both kinds of like more often than older people do, and that men and women use it approximately equally often. The perceived age and gender distribution is quite different, however; young women are perceived as using like most often. Additionally, informants guess the age of like guises as younger than they do the age of non‐ like guises in a matched‐guise study, and also rate like guises more positively in terms of solidarity‐based criteria, but less positively in terms of status‐based criteria.

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