Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T13:37:12.843Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: effects of function, context and predictability1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2016

ERIK SCHLEEF  and
DANIELLE TURTON
ERIK SCHLEEF
Affiliation:
Department of English and American Studies, University of Salzburg, Unipark Nonntal, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, [email protected]
DANIELLE TURTON
Affiliation:
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines sociophonetic variation in different functions of like among adolescents in London and Edinburgh. It attempts to determine the factors that may explain this variation. Our results suggest that the function of like correlates primarily with contextual factors, rather than the phonetic factors of vowel quality, /l/ to vowel duration and /k/ realisation. In particular, the preceding and following segments and their bigram predictability emerge as highly significant, in addition to the boundary strength following like. In both London and Edinburgh, the vowel appears to be the only non-contextual feature that is sensitive to the function of like: quotative be like is more likely to be monophthongised than other functions of like. We argue that the more monophthongal nature of quotative like is due to the syntactic and prosodic context in which it occurs.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 35 - 75
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This research was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, grant AH/K003674/1, Erik Schleef PI). We are grateful to Fernanda McDougall and Patrycja Strycharczuk for assisting ably with coding and corpus handling. We thank Josef Fruehwald for providing us with the Praat script for speech rate, and Constantine Lignos for his assistance in extracting bigram frequencies from the SUBTLEX corpus. We also thank Maciej Baranowski, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Tine Breban, Jenny Cheshire, Yuni Kim, Laurel MacKenzie and the members of the University of Manchester Phonology reading group for their expert advice on the topic. Particular thanks go to two anonymous reviewers for providing us with extremely helpful, considerate and insightful comments, which have shaped this paper. We alone are responsible for any failings or shortcomings that remain.

References

Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English discourse particles. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aitken, Adam Jack. 1984. Scottish accents and dialects. In Trudgill, Peter (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 94–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ash, Sharon. 1982. The vocalization of /l/ in Philadelphia. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Beaken, Michael. 1971. A study of phonological development in a primary school population of East London. Unpublished PhD thesis, University College London.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. & Hirschberg, Julia. 1993. The ToBI annotation conventions. Unpublished manuscript. Available online: www1.cs.columbia.edu/~jjv/pubs/tobi_convent.pdf. Accessed 12 August 2014.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan, Jurafsky, Daniel, Fosler-Lussier, Eric, Girand, Cynthia, Gregory, Michelle & Gildea, Daniel. 2003. Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 113, 1001–24.Google Scholar
Berg, Thomas. 2000. The position of adjectives on the noun–verb continuum. English Language and Linguistics 4, 269–93.Google Scholar
Blyth, Carl, Recktenwald, Sigrid & Wang, Jenny. 1990. I'm like, ‘say what?!’ A new quotative in American oral narrative. American Speech 65, 215–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul. 2001. Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5, 341–5.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Traugott, Elizabeth C.. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brugman, Hennie & Russel, Albert. 2004. Annotating multi-media/multi-modal resources with ELAN. In Lino, M., Xavier, M., Ferreira, F., Costa, R. & Silva, R. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004), 2065–8. Paris: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc & New, Boris. 2009. Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods 41, 977–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2001. An alternative view of like: Its grammaticalization in conversational American English and beyond. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 11, 21–41.Google Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2004. The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system: US English and British English compared. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2006. Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the UK. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10, 362–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2014. Quotatives: New trends and sociolinguistic implications. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle & D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2009. Localized globalisation: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like . Journal of Sociolinguistics 13, 291–331.Google Scholar
Bush, Nathan. 1999. The predictive value of transitional probability for word-boundary palatalization in English. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.Google Scholar
Butters, Ronald. 1982. Editor's note to Schourup (1982). American Speech 57, 149.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2002. Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation and Change 14, 261–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2003. Mechanisms of change in grammaticalization: The role of frequency. In Joseph, Brian D. & Janda, Richard D. (eds.), Handbook of historical linguistics, 602–23. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Scheibman, Joanne. 1999. The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don't in English. Linguistics 37, 575–96.Google Scholar
Carter, Paul & Local, John. 2007. F2 variation in Newcastle and Leeds English liquid systems. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37, 183–99.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Sue & Torgersen, Eivind. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 151–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chirrey, Deborah. 1999. Edinburgh: Descriptive material. In Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard J. (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 223–9. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 2001. Gimson's Pronunciation of English, 6th edition. Abingdon and New York: Arnold.Google Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2005. Like: Syntax and development. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2006. Lexical replacement and the like(s). American Speech 81, 339–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2007. Like and language ideology: Disentangling fact from fiction. American Speech 82, 386–419.Google Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2014. Discourse. In Bowern, Claire & Evans, Bethwyn (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 410–22. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2015. Quotation and advances in understanding syntactic systems. Annual Review of Linguistics 1, 43–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer. 2000. The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like . Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, 60–80.Google Scholar
Dion, Nathalie & Poplack, Shana. 2007. Linguistic mythbusting: The role of the media in diffusing change. Presented at New Ways of Analysing Variation 36, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Dinkin, Aaron J. 2008. The real effect of word frequency on phonetic variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14.1.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie K. 2009. A sociophonetic ethnography of Selwyn Girls’ High. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie K. 2011. Sociophonetic variation and the lemma. Journal of Phonetics 39, 694–707.Google Scholar
Durham, Mercedes, Haddican, Bill, Zweig, Eytan, Johnson, Daniel Ezra, Baker, Zipporah, Cockeram, David, Danks, Esther & Tyler, Louise. 2012. Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of be like . Journal of English Linguistics 40, 316–37.Google Scholar
ELAN. Language archiving technology, version 3.8.0. 2009. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/. Accessed 6 November 2009.Google Scholar
Ferrara, Kathleen & Bell, Barbara. 1995. Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be + like . American Speech 70, 265–90.Google Scholar
Fowler, Carol A. & Housum, Jonathan. 1987. Talkers’ signaling of ‘new’ and ‘old’ words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language 26, 489–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, Sue. 2007. The demise of Cockneys? Language change in London's ‘traditional’ East End. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex.Google Scholar
Haas, Florian. 2007. The development of English each other: Grammaticalization, lexicalization, or both? English Language and Linguistics 11, 31–50.Google Scholar
Haddican, William, Zweig, Eytan & Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2015. Change in the syntax and semantics of be like quotatives. In Biberauer, Theresa & Walkden, George (eds.), Syntax over time: Lexical, morphological and information-structural interactions. Proceedings of the 12th meeting of Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiDS XII), 54–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.. 2004. An introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edition. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer & Baayen, Harold. 2002. Parsing and productivity. In Booij, Geert & van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of morphology, 203–35. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 2003. Grammaticalization. In Joseph, Brian D. & Janda, Richard D. (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 575–601. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heuven, Walter J. B. van, Mandera, Pawel, Keuleers, Emmanuel & Brysbaert, Marc. 2014. Subtlex-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 67, 1176–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopper, Paul & Traugott, Elizabeth C.. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Hornik, Kurt & Zeileis, Achim. 2006. Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15, 651–74.Google Scholar
Hughes, Arthur, Trudgill, Peter & Watt, Dominic. 2012. English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnston, Paul. 1985. The rise and fall of the Morningside/Kelvinside accent. In Manfred Görlach (ed.), Focus on: Scotland, 37–56. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Johnston, Paul. 2007. Scottish English and Scots. In Britain, David (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 105–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Alan & Girand, Cynthia. 2002. The role of lemma in form variation. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology VII, 1–34. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Alan, Gregory, Michelle & Raymond, William D.. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Bybee, Joan L. & Hopper, Paul J. (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure, 229–54. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kelly, Michael H. & Kathryn Bock, J.. 1988. Stress in time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, 389–403.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, Torgersen, Eivind & Fox, Sue. 2008. Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20, 451–91.Google Scholar
Klewitz, Gabriele & Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 1999. Quote – unquote? The role of prosody in the contextualization of reported speech sequences. Pragmatics 9: 459–485.Google Scholar
Krug, Manfred. 1998. String frequency: A cognitive motivating factor in coalescence, language processing, and linguistic change. Journal of English Linguistics 26, 286–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on grammaticalization. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In Wischer, Ilse & Diewald, Gabriele (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization, 1–18. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Schleef, Erik. 2013. Hitting an Edinburgh target: Immigrant adolescents’ acquisition of variation in Edinburgh English. In Lawson, Robert (ed.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on Scotland, 103–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Phillips, Betty S. 2006. Word frequency and lexical diffusion. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2014. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. www.R-project.org. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Rhodes, Richard A. 1996. English reduced vowels and the nature of natural processes. In Hurch, Bernhard & Rhodes, Richard (eds.), Natural phonology: The state of the art, 239–59. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne & Lange, Deborah. 1991. The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalisation in process. American Speech 66, 227–79.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schleef, Erik. 2013. Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: Effects of word frequency and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change 25, 201–23.Google Scholar
Schleef, Erik, Meyerhoff, Miriam & Clark, Lynn. 2011. Teenagers’ acquisition of variation: A comparison of locally-born and migrant teens’ realisation of English (ing) in Edinburgh and London. English World-Wide 32, 206–36.Google Scholar
Schourup, Lawrence Clifford. 1983. Common discourse particles in English conversation. Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 28.Google Scholar
Scobbie, James M., Hewlett, Nigel & Turk, Alice E.. 1999. Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: The Scottish vowel length rule revealed. In Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard J. (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 230–45. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Scobbie, James M. & Pouplier, Marianne. 2010. The role of syllable structure in external sandhi: An EPG study of vocalisation and retraction in word-final English /l/. Journal of Phonetics 38, 240–59.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elizabeth O. 1984. Phonology and syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Speitel, Hans H. 1983. A sociolinguistic investigation of Edinburgh speech. Unpublished end of grant report for the Social Science Research Council.Google Scholar
Sproat, Richard & Fujimora, Osamu. 1993. Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. Journal of Phonetics 21, 291–311.Google Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, Malley, James & Tutz, Gerhard. 2009. An introduction to recursive partitioning: Rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests. Psychological Methods 14, 323–48.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 1999. Glasgow: Accent and voice quality. In Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard J. (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 203–22. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2008. Scottish English: phonology. In Kortmann, Bernd & Upton, Clive (eds.), Varieties of English: The British Isles, 48–70. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2004. He's like, she's like: The quotative system in Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8, 493–514.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2007. Frequency and variation in the community grammar: Tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation and Change 19, 199–217.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Hudson, Rachel. 1999. Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 147–72.Google Scholar
Tamminga, Meredith. 2014. Sound change without frequency effects: Ramifications for phonological theory. In Santana-LaBarge, Robert E. (ed.), Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, vol. 31, 457–65. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Tollfree, Laura. 1999. South East London English: Discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal reduction. In Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard J. (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 163–84. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Turton, Danielle. 2014. An ultrasound investigation of /l/-darkening in English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20.Google Scholar
Underhill, Robert. 1988. Like is like, focus. American Speech 63, 234–46.Google Scholar
Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2012. Quotative go and be like: Grammar and grammaticalization. In Buchstaller, Isabelle & van Alphen, Ingrid (eds.), Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspectives, 173–202. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wichmann, Anne. 2011. Grammaticalization and prosody. In Narrog, Heiko & Heine, Bernd (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 331–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yuan, Jiahong & Liberman, Mark. 2009. Investigating /l/ variation in English through forced alignment. Interspeech 10, 2215–18.Google Scholar
Yuan, Jiahong & Liberman, Mark. 2011. /l/ variation in American English: A corpus approach. Journal of Speech Sciences 1, 35–46.Google Scholar
Zipf, George Kingsley. 1929. Relative frequency as a determinant of phonetic change. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 15, 1–95.Google Scholar