The recent advent and rapid spread of two new vernacular options, go and like,
within the (say) variable has attracted a growing body of research in variationist
sociolinguists. This thesis examines the synchronic functions of these new
quotatives and considers pragmatic, discourse, and social factors. The
investigation is based on an analysis of very large corpora of spontaneous spoken
British and American English. This cross-variety comparison gives me the
opportunity (i) to investigate a case of rapid language change that is happening
concurrently with the time of research and (ii) to consider to what extent social
and linguistic constraints hold globally.A variationist study of the constraints which govern the quotative system is
valuable for the following reasons: By investigating the patterning of the (say)
variable as a whole, we gain insights into the rule-governed variability of
innovative features and their rival variants (say, tell, think, cry, ...). A look at the
entire quotative system reveals the intimate interplay of competing choices within
the (say) variable. My project aims at understanding how the system as a whole
reacts to the intrusion of newcomer variants. A sharply delimited and hitherto
stable set of variants - such as the (say) variable - presents the unique opportunity
to investigate the restructuring of all variants as new ones come in. This is
especially interesting when we look at competing choices which have the same [-
canonical] underlying semantic feature, such as unframed quotes. The data show
that far from ousting the unframed or say-variant, like and go add options within
the vernacular categoryA comparative study on the patterning of non-canonical variants within the
quotative pool produces important insights into phenomena such as reallocation,
competition within one socio-pragmatic field, as well as interaction of variants
ii
within the same variable. In this light, the restructuring of all quotative variants
during the rapid intrusion of the robust new variant like gives us an important
test-case for various explanatory parameters for language change that have been
raised in the literature, i.e. Romaine's claims about language and gender (2003),
the reallocation hypothesis as raised by Britain (2002) and Britain and Trudgill
(1999), the reformulation of the standard vs. non-standard dichotomy into local vs.
supra-local variants by Foulkes and Docherty (1999) and the Milroys' findings
(1998) concerning network and class.Furthermore, research in variationist sociolinguistics has revealed the
importance of intralinguistic constraints in situations of competing grammars
(Meyerhoff 2000, Preston 1991, Rickford and MacNair-Knox 1994). Using a
synthetic approach which looks at both intralinguistic and extralinguistic
constraints, I attempt to explain the variability at all levels within the variable in
order to account for as much of the variability as possible. Investigation into an
array of linguistic factors reveals that linguistic constraints on the members of the
(say) variable are indeed very important and quite robust.A cross-variety comparison gives insights into how much we can generalize
our findings: do locally separate systems handle the situation in the same way?
The comparison of pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors reveals some interesting
but subtle differences in go's and tike's development in different locales. This
raises more fundamental linguistic questions, such as are whether we are indeed
comparing the same variable in the US and in Britain. My findings give evidence
of the restructuring processes in the quotative system as a whole that accompany
the arrival of a newcomer variant, like, in two varieties, British English and US
English. There is evidence that different systems find idiosyncratic solutions to
similar problems. This finding constitutes an important contribution to the
growing body of research on globalisation phenomena and supra-local trends
(Buchstaller 2003, Kerswill 2003, Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003, Tagliamonte
and Hudson 1999, Trudgill 1983, 1994, and many others)
