Innovative quotatives - language change or youth-speak? : A corpus-based study of spoken British English

Sammanfattning: This paper investigates the possible effect of age on quotative variation in spoken British English with focus on the innovative quotative constructions be like and go and the standard construction say. The study is corpus-based and uses the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 as its material. Using the search tools provided in the corpus, datasets were restricted to include material from female speakers only and for each age-bracket in isolation. The results of the study were analysed in apparent time and through real time comparisons with previous studies. Similarly to previous studies, it was found that be like constructions are still favoured by young speakers, but the results also indicate that be like is used at higher frequencies among middle-aged speakers than previous studies have demonstrated. This indicates that be like is indeed an example of language change and not just an age-graded feature. The second innovative quotative investigated was go. The frequency distribution demonstrated by go was very different to that of be like. The results indicate that the ratio of go in comparison to be like (and say) have decreased drastically in the past twenty years when the results of the present study were compared to previous studies. This may indicate that the presence of two or more quotative variants within a speaker community may lead to the reduction in use of one of these variants due to "linguistic competition". The results of this study strengthen previous arguments that the presence of be like may lead to a decrease in the use of quotative go. The standard form say is still the most common variant for most age-brackets, apart from adolescent and young-adult speakers. However, in comparison to earlier studies the ratios of say have decreased for middle-aged speakers and younger. This may be due to an increased choice of quotative variants which are available to the speaker.