Like as a discourse marker in different varieties of English : A contrastive corpus-based study

Details

Supervisors

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique

Abstract

enThe central objective of this master’s thesis is to explore the use of the discourse marker like across five varieties of Inner Circle English, namely American, British, Canadian, Irish and New Zealand English. The innovative character of this study lies in its contrastive dimension. An analysis of the use of like was carried out on data from the ‘direct conversations’ section of the SBC, ICE-GB, ICE-CA, ICE-IR and ICE-NZ in order to identify the similarities and differences between these subcorpora in terms of frequency of use, position, function and sociolinguistic determinants of the discourse marker like. The quantitative analysis reveals important differences across the five varieties under study: the discourse marker like is significantly more frequent in Irish English than in the other subcorpora and British English comes in final position in terms of frequency. From a qualitative point of view, the results of the analyses show a strong tendency shared by the five subcorpora for the discourse marker like to occur in utterance-medial position with a focusing function. Finally, the analysis of speaker’s gender and age reveals that the discourse marker like is most prominent among 19 to 24-year old females in the SBC and among 31 to 40-year old males in ICE-CA. The influence of those two sociolinguistic variables appears to be limited, however, since there is a great deal of variation across individual speakers’ use of like.