You're like `why not?' The quotative expressions of Glasgow ...

Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/1, 2001: 3±21 

You're like `why not?' 

The quotative expressions of Glasgow 

adolescents 1 

Ronald Macaulay 

Pitzer College 

Claremont, California 

The sociolinguistic study of discourse features is still at a very elementary stage, 

so there is very little evidence available on which to trace changes in the use of 

such features. One feature that has received attention is the use of nontraditional 

quotatives in the U.S., particularly by younger speakers, in the 

past twenty years. The use of be like as a quotative has spread from its presumed 

origin in California to other parts of the U.S. and also to Canada and England. 

This paper examines the further spread of non-traditional quotatives to the 

speech of adolescents in Glasgow and how these forms might have been 

transmitted. 

KEYWORDS: Quotatives, be like, age, gender, social class, Scottish 

speech 

1. INTRODUCTION 

Sociolinguistic studies of linguistic change, for obvious reasons, mostly focus on 

sound change Labov 1966; Milroy 1992), with occasional interest in morphological 

change or syntactic change. Studies of changes in discourse features are 

still relatively rare e.g. Dubois 1993; Vincent 1993), partly because such 

features have only recently been systematically studied, so there is little 

historical perspective. One relatively new feature that has received considerable 

attention is the use of like, both as a focus marker Underhill 1988; Dailey- 

O'Cain 2000) and as a quotative introducing dialogue Romaine and Lange 

1991; Ferrara and Bell 1995; Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). The latter usage 

was not noted until 1982 Butters 1982) but it has spread from its assumed 

origin in California to much of the U.S., and even to Canada and Britain 

Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). This paper examines the further spread of 

quotative be like to the speech of adolescents recorded in Glasgow in 1997. 

Interest in the structure of oral narrative e.g. Labov 1972; Johnstone 1990) 

has focused attention on situations where a speaker in telling a story reproduces 

# Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 

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4 

MACAULAY 

the actual words someone including the speaker) allegedly said or thought at 

the time. Traditionally known as oratio recta in contrast to oratio obliqua or 

`reported speech'), this form of reporting àn utterance belonging to someone 

else' Voloshinov 1986: 116, emphasis in original) has been examined as `direct 

speech' Coulmas 1986), `quoted direct speech' Macaulay 1987), and `constructed 

dialogue' Tannen 1989). Li claims that `direct speech is universal; 

indirect speech is not' 1986: 39) and that `direct quote is the most common 

expression at the peak of oral narratives in many languages' 1986: 40). 

Tannen points out that `many researchers for example, Labov 1972; Ochs 

1979; Chafe 1980; Schi€rin 1981; Tannen 1982) have observed that narration 

is more vivid when speech is presented as ®rst-person dialogue ``direct 

quotation'') rather than third-person report `ìndirect quotation'')' Tannen 

1986: 311). Given the signi®cance of quoted direct speech in oral narratives, it 

is important to identify when it occurs. Anyone who has transcribed a number 

of oral narratives knows that there are ambiguous utterances whose attribution 

to a speaker is problematic. In most cases, however, the direct speech is 

signalled not only by intonation but usually also by some òvert introducer' 

Ferrara and Bell 1995: 265), `dialogue introducer' Johnstone 1987), or 

`quotative' Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). 

The most common introducer is one of the verba dicendi, such as say though in 

some cases there is no introducer: 

1) WR 145 and the auld yin says to him `Whaur are you going?' 

146 he says Ì'm going to my work' 

ˆ) 147 Òh you got a job?' 

ˆ) 148 Àye' 

ˆ) 149 `Whit are you daeing?' 

150 says Ì'm labouring to a bricklayer in the town' 

ˆ) 151 Òh very good 

152 away and get your bus' he says 

Macaulay 1987: 28) 

Lines 145, 146, and 150 signal the direct speech by the verb says, but lines 147, 

148, 149, and 151, each of which indicates a change of speaker, have no such 

introducer. The absence of an overt introducer has been termed a `zero 

quotative' Mathis and Yule 1994). Tannen suggests that there is a continuum: 

At one pole is no introducer at all, used in informal conversational narrative because of 

the great expressive power of the human voice. At the other pole is the use of graphic 

verbs as introducers ± a form typical of literary narrative. 

Tannen 1986: 323) 

Graphic verbs Labov 1972) include complain, mutter, whisper, groan, etc. 

Tannen 1986: 322). 2 Such overt characterizing of the speaker's tone and 

attitude is rare in oral narratives. Narrators more commonly use intonation 

and mimicry Macaulay 1987: 7±13) for these purposes. Nevertheless, some 

speakers make use of a range of quotatives in presenting direct speech as in 2): 

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 5 

2) When she said that, I said, `Well, is that in California?' 'cause I wasn't sure if it was 

in California. 

And she goes, `Yes.' 

And I'm like, Òh.' and I go, Ìs that where the redwoods are?' 

And she goes, `No.' 

And I'm like, Òh.' 

Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang 1990: 215) 

2. EARLIER ACCOUNTS OF NON-TRADITIONAL QUOTATIVES 

The quotatives go and be like are relatively recent innovations, apparently 

starting among younger speakers, possibly in California. Butters 1980) comments 

on go as a fairly new phenomenon and Butters 1982) similarly draws 

attention to be like, indicating that such usages were probably unfamiliar at those 

dates to many of the readers of American Speech, the journal of the American 

Dialect Society. Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang found that older speakers in their 

sample were less likely to use go than teenagers and college-age speakers, and no 

speaker older than 38 used be like 1990: 219). In Schi€rin's sample, only 10 

percent of the 358 quotatives were go 1981: 58) and the overwhelming majority 

97%) were in the historical present tense; she does not mention be like. In 

Tannen's study, of 84quotatives 13 percent were go and 8 percent be like 1986: 

315). Johnstone 1987, 1990) cites examples with go as well as say but does not 

give any ®gures as to their frequency. Of be like, she says that it ìs widely used by 

Americans in their teens and early twenties' 1987: 51) and wonders whether it 

is used elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Ferrara and Bell 1995), in a 

corpus of 115 speakers collected in Texas in 1990, found that there was a 

signi®cant age di€erence in the use of quotatives. For both the younger speakers 

18±25 year olds) and older speakers 40+), the most common form of quotative 

was some form of say 42% and 91% respectively). The younger speakers used a 

form of go 25 percent of the time and a form of be like 23 percent of the time. The 

older speakers used went two percent of the time and be like not at all based on 

Tables 2 and 3, Ferrara and Bell 1995: 274±75). Later samples in 1992 and 

1994apparently indicate increased use of be like, but Ferrara and Bell do not give 

percentages or age-grading details. 

In 1995 Dailey-O'Cain recorded sociolinguistic interviews with 30 speakers 

who, like Dailey-O'Cain herself, `were all from a middle-class to upper-middleclass 

socioeconomic background, and had grown up in southeastern Michigan' 

2000: 64). She found 95 examples of quotative like, the majority in the 14±29 

age group and none from the speakers older than 50. Although the usage was 

higher among males the di€erence was not statistically signi®cant. 

Dougherty and Strassel 1998), in a paper given at NWAVE±27, report on a 

study of 17 speakers aged 18 to 80, recorded in Philadelphia, in sociolinguistic 

interviews by Dougherty in 1997. They found that the four 18±19 year olds 

used be like with a frequency of about 70 percent, two speakers in their 20s with 


6 

MACAULAY 

a frequency of 55 percent, two speakers in their 30s with a frequency of slightly 

over 20 percent, and one woman aged 40 with a frequency of 15 percent. None 

of the speakers over 40 had any tokens of be like. Only the two 18 year olds used 

go very often 12%); for the remaining 15 speakers the frequency of go is less 

than ®ve percent. Dougherty and Strassel's results con®rm the picture of the 

situation given by Ferrara and Bell. 

Sanchez and Charity 1999), in a paper given at NWAVE±28, report on the 

results of a set of 14sociolinguistic interviews recorded in a predominantly 

African-American community. They found that of 1550 quotatives, 44 percent 

were be like and only one percent were go. However, be like accounted for 62 

percent of the quotatives used by speakers under forty years of age and only 12 

percent of those by speakers over forty. There was no age di€erence in the use of 

go. The pattern that emerges from these studies suggests that go became popular 

in the U.S. among younger speakers about 25±30 years ago but soon was 

replaced by be like, although older speakers continued to use go. Igoe, Lamb, 

Gilman and Kim 1999), in another paper presented at NWAVE±28, reported 

that out of a corpus of 311 quotatives collected by an introductory sociolinguistics 

class and the University of Pennsylvania 54percent were be like, but 

they also collected 18 examples 6%) of be all e.g. I'm all `Whatever dude'). All 

the latter examples were provided by Californians. There is no evidence so far 

that this form has been adopted further east. 

Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999) have shown that use of the quotatives go and 

be like has spread from the U.S. to British and Canadian university students aged 

between 18 and 28, in samples collected in 1996 and 1995 respectively. The 

®gures are given in Table 1. These ®gures show, in answer to Johnstone's query, 

that be like and also go have spread to other parts of the English-speaking world, 3 

though there would appear to be a time-lag with go still ahead in Canada and 

Table 1: Use of quotatives by British and Canadian students Tagliamonte 

and Hudson 1999: 158) 

British Canadian 

% N % N 

say 31 209) 36 219) 

go 18 120) 22 135) 

be like 18 120) 13 79) 

think 18 123) 427) 

zero 10 66) 20 123) 

be just 0 1) 0 0) 

to be 2 10) 1 5) 

Miscellaneous 2 16) 4 24) 

Total 665) 612) 



equal with be like in Britain. University students, however, are not a homogeneous 

group, and family background and other factors may a€ect use of features such as 

quotatives, but Tagliamonte and Hudson do not give any demographic information 

on their speakers, other than that they are middle-class. 

3. THE DATA 

The present paper illustrates the use of quotatives by a younger sample of British 

speakers, 13±14year olds in Glasgow, Scotland. The examples come from 

materials collected for an investigation of language variation and change in 

Glasgow, focusing on phonetic change Stuart-Smith 1999). 4 In the summer of 

1997, 32 Glaswegians were recorded in same-sex dyadic conversations of 

approximately 35 minutes long. The speakers were drawn from two areas of 

the city, representing broadly urban working-class and suburban middle-class 

areas. The sample consists of two age-groups: adolescents 13±14) and adults 

40+), with equal numbers of males and females. For each session one speaker 

was selected and asked to choose someone they would feel comfortable talking to 

in the presence of a tape-recorder for about half an hour. The participants were 

free to talk about anything they wished. The sessions were transcribed in their 

entirety, both as dialogues and with the contribution of each speaker tabulated 

separately. Although this paper deals principally with the use of quotatives by the 

adolescents, evidence will be given later of the quotatives used by the adults. 

Adolescents 

Naturally, the sessions produced varying amounts of speech as can be seen in 

Table 2, which gives the totals for the adolescent speakers. As can be seen from 

Table 2, the working-class girls talk the most and the working-class boys the 

least. More important for the present purpose is the amount of narrative 

contained in each session as that is where quoted dialogue is most likely to 

occur. The proportion for each of the groups is given in Table 3. It can be seen 

that while the middle-class boys and girls are similar in the proportion of the 

session devoted to narrative, the working-class girls provide much more and the 

Table 2: Combined word totals in adolescent 

conversations by gender and social class 

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 

Words Average per speaker 

Working-class boys 7,415 1,854 

Middle-class girls 10,421 2,605 

Middle-class boys 11,532 2,883 

Working-class girls 13,6783,420

8 

Table 3: Proportion of narrative in adolescent 

conversations 

Middle-class girls 28% 

Middle-class boys 27% 

Working-class girls 60% 

Working-class boys 5% 

All girls 46% 

All boys 18% 

Middle-class adolescents 27% 

Working-class adolescents 40% 

All adolescents 34% 

working-class boys almost none. The 246 instances of quoted dialogue are 

consequently unevenly distributed among the speakers with 76 percent 

occurring in the sessions with girls, with two-thirds of those occurring in the 

two sessions with working-class girls, as can be seen in Figure 1. The overall 

®gures are therefore skewed by this distribution but the proportion of forms used 

by each group is revealing. It is clear from the examples in 3) and 4) that both 

go and be like have reached the younger generation in Britain: 

3) a. and my sister goes Ùh-huh 

how do you know him?' 

b. and Kate goes Òh yeah 

he's in my big brother's football team' 

c. he's going Òh I'll just have to have her' and all that 

d. she went `Who are you going with?' 

e. I went `Louise's not even asked me if she could come' 

Middle-class boys 

Working-class boys 

Middle-class girls 

Figure 1: Distribution of quotatives in adolescent conversations 

MACAULAY 

Working-class girls 



4) a. And I'm like `No that's sick' 

b. And I'm like `Woops' 

c. she's like Ìs your sister going out with a guy called Paul?' 

d. her ma's like `Go on make me a co€ee' 

e. I was like `What the fuck is that?' 

However, there is evidence of some innovation or confusion in the transmission, 

as the examples in 5) and 6) show: 

5) a. I was like that Òn you go' 

b. and Amanda was like that `Batter him' 

c. you were like that Àw shut up man' 

d. he was like that `Your maw came in by the way' 

e. I was like that `Shit' 

6) a. she went like that `Do you no think that's a bit two-faced?' 

b. she just went like that `Fuck you you wanker' 

c. we all used to go like that Ì wish I was like her like her' 

d. one of the boys went like that to him `You've lost your virginity' 

e. I went like that Àaah my voice' 

None of the American or other) examples that I have seen include quotatives 

such as I was like that or she went like that. All the examples occur in the past 

tense.) Both these forms carry the suggestion of a gestural deictic that cannot be 

recovered from the audio-tapes, and yet in most cases the idea of an 

accompanying gesture seems implausible. The that is clearly the demonstrative 

pronoun and not the complementizer. The use of was/went like that is mostly 

found where the quoted speech shows strong emotion, as in examples 5 b, d, e) 

and 6 b, e). Even examples such as 5 d), which might seem to be neutral in 

tone, are emotionally charged because the speaker did not want her mother to 

know what she had been doing. Romaine and Lange argue `that when like is 

used to introduce quotation, it is devoid of neither semantic meaning nor 

syntactic status' 1991: 246). In example 6e) I went like that Àaah my voice'), 

the use of like is close to its basic use as a preposition in I went like this Àaaah' 

with the di€erent deictic pronoun. The examples in 5) and 6) all can be 

interpreted as retaining a strong sense of the basic comparative meaning of like. 

The use of the distal pronoun that, however, shows that was/went like that is a 

true quotative. 

There is also a rare form done that, also with the distal deictic. The examples 

are given in 7): 

7) a. and Stephanie done that `What are you talking about?' 

b. Kelly done that to David and me one day `You two should become best pals' 

c. I went up to Chantel and done that says Ìt's not me that hates you' 

The last example with the addition of says to done that suggest that this form 

may need reinforcement as a quotative. The ®gures for all the quotatives are 

given in Table 4. Unlike in other reports of quotatives Tagliamonte and Hudson 


10 

Table 4: Distribution of quotative verbs used by 

Glasgow adolescents 

% N 

say 2458) 

go 26 63) 

be like 1433) 

be like that 7 17) 

go like that 5 13) 

be 3 8) 

think 2 6) 

done that 2 4 ) 

zero 14 33) 

other 3 7) 

Total 242) 

MACAULAY 

1999: 158), among the Glasgow adolescents the most frequently used quotative 

is not say 24%). For the Glasgow adolescents some form of go is the most 

frequent, accounting for 26 percent of the examples, just ahead of say with 24 

percent. Forms with like total 26 percent, but they include examples with that 

and go, which makes direct comparison with other results more problematic. 

The proportion of be like without that) is 14percent, which taken with the 26 

percent of go, suggests the same kind of time-lag that was found in Tagliamonte 

and Hudson's study. 5 

Tagliamonte and Hudson do not mention tense in their analysis. The most 

frequent form of say in the Glasgow adolescent sessions is says 68%), used with 

both ®rst and third person subjects. In contrast, the form of go is more frequently in 

the past tense 67%). Forms of be like are also more likely 58%) to be in the past 

tense, and all the examples of be like that are in the past tense, as are those of go like 

that. If all the examples with like are combined, 78 percent are in the past tense. 

Since past tense also has a distal deictic meaning, this reinforces the impact of that. 

Tagliamonte and Hudson looked at the e€ect of the attributed speaker on the 

choice of quotative. They summarize earlier ®ndings showing that be like was 

favoured for ®rst person subjects Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang 1990; Romaine 

and Lange 1991) and cite claims that it was increasingly being used with third 

person subjects Ferrara and Bell 1995). Neither Sanchez and Charity nor Igoe, 

Lamb, Gilman and Kim found any preference for ®rst person subjects. Tagliamonte 

and Hudson found `no evidence for the expansion of be like into 3rd 

person contexts' 1999: 161) for their York sample. In Glasgow the three most 

common quotatives are all used more frequently with 3rd person subjects as can 

be seen in Table 5. It can be seen that there is no preference for 1st person 

subjects for be like or any other form, with the exception of be by itself e.g. so I'm 

`Why?'), but there are very few examples of this quotative. 



Table 5: Distribution of quotatives according to person of subject the ®gures 

in parentheses refer to plural subjects) 

The skewed distribution of forms makes gender comparisons hazardous, 

since the girls produce three-quarters of the quotatives in the sample. There is 

also the dubious status of forms such as be like that and go like that, since there 

is no reference to such quotatives elsewhere. It is, however, possible to look at 

be like alone. There are some interesting social class and gender implications in 

the use of go and be like, as can be seen in Figure 2, which shows the proportion 

of these quotatives produced by each group of adolescents. It can be seen from 

Figure 2 that be like without that) is predominantly a middle-class form among 

the Glasgow adolescents with the middle-class girls using it more than any 

other form 56%) and the middle-class boys choosing it 21 percent of the time, 

though their preferred form is go. The working-class girls, who are responsible 

for 59 percent of all the quotatives in the sample, choose be like only 11 percent 

of the time. All the examples of be by itself are given by girls with equal 

numbers from the two social class groups, but since the working-class girls 

produce three times as many quotatives, the proportion of be quotatives is 

higher for the middle-class girls. 


say go be/go like that) be 

% N % N % N % N 

1st person 34 20 3824 2) 36 23 2) 50 4 

2nd person 3 2 2 1 5 3 12 1 

3rd person 62 37 2) 60 381) 59 37 4) 38 3 

60 

50 

40 

30 

20 

10 

0 

be like go 

Working-class girls 

Middle-class girls 

Working-class boys 

Middle-class boys 

Figure 2: Percentage of be like and go by gender and social class adolescent 

sample)

12 

MACAULAY 

Adults 

Not surprisingly, there are fewer examples of go or be like as quotatives in the 

adult sessions. The ®gures are given in Table 6. As with the adolescents, the 

distribution of quotatives in the adult conversations is highly skewed. Of the 

total number of quotatives in the sample, the working-class women produce 71 

percent, the middle-class women 19 percent, and the middle-class and workingclass 

men between them have only 10 percent of the total, as can be seen in 

Figure 3. 

Table 6: Distribution of quotative verbs used by 

Glasgow adults 

Middle-class women 

Working-class men 

Middle-class men 

% N 

say 72 404) 

go 11 59) 

be like 0.2 1) 

be like that 1 7) 

go like that 0.2 1) 

be 0 0) 

think 8 46) 

done that 0 0) 

other 1 5) 

zero 6 35) 

Total 558) 

Figure 3: Distribution of quotatives in adult conversations 

Working-class women 



In addition, for all but three of the conversations one between middle-class 

women and two between working-class women) quotatives are restricted to say, 

with a few examples of think. Consequently, 98 percent 57/59) of the examples 

of go are found in these three conversations between women, and 85 percent 

49/59) in the two working-class sessions. In other words, there are only eight 

examples of go in one of the conversations between middle-class women and 

only a single one in one of the conversations between middle-class men. On this 

evidence go is primarily a working-class form, though it is impossible to tell 

whether it might be a feature of working-class men's speech, since there are so 

few quotatives in their sessions. 

All eight examples of be like that/went like that are uttered by one workingclass 

woman as in the examples in 8): 

8) a. and she's like that Òh I don't think he'll need them cos he'll no be getting fags' 

b. and they were like that `How're you doing Mary?' 

c. we were like that `Sit doon sit doon' 

d. and he was like that `What's the answers?' 

e. she went like that er Èverything should just stay there' 

This speaker also has a few examples where be like that is combined with say as 

in the examples in 9): 

9) a. I was like that I said `There's nae line' 

b. I was like that I says `No really changed anything' 

There are also examples where be like that occurs in the context of quoted 

dialogue but is not actually a quotative: 

10) and I was like that 

I mean she phoned me up and I says `No' 

I says Ì canna dae it' 

she says `How no?' 

I says Ì've a± a± already made arrangements to go oot wi Joan' I says 

and she went Òh aye right' 

As with the adolescent examples, the examples in 8±10) suggest that the U.S. 

form of be like has not crossed the Atlantic in a straightforward fashion. The 

contrast with the adolescent use shown in Figure 2 can be seen in Figure 4. In 

contrast to the adolescents where it is the middle-class girls who show the 

highest use of be like and the middle-class boys who use go the most, among the 

adults the working-class women lead in both categories. Although there was 

more speech recorded in the sessions with working-class women, the di€erences 

are too great to be explained that way. The evidence from the adult sessions 

suggests that go arrived in Glasgow some time ago. 

The use of the non-traditional quotatives i.e. all those other than say, think, 

zero, and òther') is skewed. As has been observed elsewhere Macaulay 1987: 

28), quoted dialogue often contains discourse markers such as well and the 

turn-taking signal oh, particularly when there is no overt quotative see 


14 

50 

40 

30 

20 

10 

0 

Middle-class 

women 

be like that 

go 

Middle-class 

men 

Working-class 

women 

example 1) above). In the total set of non-traditional quotatives in the Glasgow 

transcripts the most frequent form of quoted speech is a question as in 

examples 11 a, b). The next most frequent category is an answer or a 

statement beginning with a discourse marker, over half the examples beginning 

with oh, as in examples 11 c, d). The next most frequent category is an 

answer to a question or a response to a statement, as in examples 11 e, f). Two 

other categories are imperatives, as in examples 11 g, h), and non-lexical 

items, as in examples 11 i, j): 

11) a. And I'm going `Who's Bobby Lee?' 

b. and she went `Was that Heinz beans you gave me?' 

c. She went Òh well that's good that's good Gran' 

d. And I went Òh it's my mum' 

e. I says `Well will that mean that men get into the car-park?' 

She went Ì would think so' 

f. I said `You'd better phone John' 

she went Àye' 

g. we were like that `Sit doon sit doon' 

h. her ma's like `Go on make me a co€ee' 

i. I was like `La la la' 

j. and he just went Èurgh' 

MACAULAY 

Working-class 

men 

Figure 4: Percentage of be like that and go by gender and social class adult 

sample) 

The distribution is shown in Figure 5. 

It is clear from this that go, etc., are not simply alternatives to say and think. 

The non-traditional quotatives are rarely used to introduce simple statements or 



Imperatives 

Answers 

remarks but have a pragmatic and rhetorical force. Golato, in an article dealing 

with the new German quotative und ich so/und er so ànd I'm like/and he's 

like'), claims that this type of quotative ìs sensitive to the context in which it is 

uttered' 2000: 32). The same would appear to be the case with non-traditional 

quotatives in Glasgow. 

4. DISCUSSION 

Given the recent history of quotatives in the U.S., it is likely that the use of be like 

and be as quotatives is a relatively new phenomenon in the speech of 

Glaswegians. 6 The ®gures from the present sessions are too slight to provide 

®rm evidence of how these forms entered the community, though there is a 

possibility suggested by the adult data and the occurrence of mixed forms with 

like that the variety of forms re¯ects the historical development of the quotatives 

in Glasgow. This would give the following scenario: 

Stage one: The quotative go imported from the U.S.?) is adopted by adolescents 

for the expression of non-speech sounds the thing that goes `Dong') and strong 

emotion and I'm going Òh no'), later extended to all kinds of quoted speech She 

went Ì would think so'). It later spreads to adult speech. 

Distributional evidence: The form go is most widely found in the adolescent 

conversations and for all kinds of quoted speech. It is found fairly frequently in 

the conversations with working-class women and is not restricted to the 

expression of emotion. It is found rarely in the middle-class conversations and 

only for the expression of emotion. This would suggest that the form entered in 

the speech of younger speakers and spread to their elders, beginning in the 

working-class. Alternatively, it could be an age-graded feature. 


Other 

Discourse markers 

Questions 

Non-lexical items 

Figure 5: Types of quoted dialogue following non-traditional quotatives

16 

Stage two: The adolescents imperfectly introduce the use of like as a quotative 

again presumably from the U.S.) but combine it with go, particularly for the 

expression of strong emotion she just went like that `Fuck you you wanker'; 

because I thought everybody would go like that `You cradle snatcher'). 

Distributional evidence: This form is essentially limited to use among the 

working-class girls. The implication is of an action with deictic reference cf. 

done that). It is used with the sense that the quoted speech was actually uttered. 

Stage three: The verb go is dropped, leaving the deictic pronoun. This implies an 

attitude rather than an action: I was like that `Shit' suggesting what she felt 

rather than what she said); she was like that Ì take it you're Miss MacKenzie' 

reporting what the speaker believed was a sarcastic recognition of herself as a 

trouble-maker). In this case, the quoted form need not have been uttered as in 

the ®rst example) but it can also be used to report an utterance as in the second 

example). 

Distributional evidence: Again, this form is principally found among the 

working-class girls but there are sporadic examples from the working-class 

women. 

Stage four: The deictic pronoun is dropped, leaving the form familiar in the U.S. 

be like. It is used for the expression of non-speech sounds and I'm like `Woops'), 

expression of strong emotion I was like Òh my God'), and the conveyance of 

animated utterances he's like `Harry fucking run'). 

Distributional evidence: As was shown in Figure 2, be like is most common 

among the middle-class adolescents though it is also used by the working-class 

girls. There is only one questionable) example in the adult conversations. 

Stage ®ve: The form like is dropped leaving only the verb be and I was Òh so this 

is Helen'). Sometimes, there is a hedge you were just kind of `Mm-mm'). 

Distributional evidence: There are only eight examples, equally distributed 

among the middle-class and working-class girls. The girls are the leaders in this 

change, if in fact there is a movement in this direction. 

The stages represent a development similar to that postulated by Traugott in 

press) for the process of grammaticalization, particularly in the movement from 

a more referential construction to a less referential one: 

go 4 go like that 4 be like that 4 be like 4 be 

MACAULAY 

The role of the animator Go€man 1981) recedes from the active agent of go to 

the `laid back' experiencer of be. 

Since there seems to be no evidence of how the form be like emerged as a 

quotative in the U.S. it is possible that a similar evolution took place there. The 

Glasgow examples would therefore be similar to the notion of the `colonial lag' 

phenomenon Trudgill 1999), where evidence of an earlier stage of develop- 



ment can be charted. The absence of any evidence of intermediate examples of 

the kind be like that in the U.S. may make this hypothesis unlikely, though it is 

also possible that earlier investigators have ignored or discounted such forms. I 

have found occasional mixed forms in conversations recorded by my students in 

California, as in the examples in 12): 

12) a. he'll stop breathing and you'll go like Òh my God he's 

like su€ocating' 

b. I go like `Woooo' you know like I'm doing 

c. and I'm all like you know `Duh duh' 

I have found no examples with deictic that, however. 

Another hypothesis for the Glasgow situation is that be like began in the 

speech of middle-class adolescents probably the girls) and was taken up by the 

working-class girls. It is impossible to say anything about the usage of the 

working-class boys since their sessions did not produce enough examples of 

quoted dialogue of the kind that would involve these quotatives.) The occurrence 

of forms such as be like that and go like that would then indicate that the 

working-class girls have not assimilated the be like form fully or that there has 

been some distortion in the transmission. There are no examples of the 

combined go like that form in the conversations of the middle-class adolescents, 

though there are three examples of be like that in one conversation between two 

middle-class boys. This might be a further indication that the innovators are the 

middle-class girls. 

Since the proportion of be like forms in the middle-class adolescent sessions is 

greater in the conversations between girls 56%) compared with the boys 21%) 

and since the middle-class boys have no examples of the newest form be by itself, 

it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the middle-class girls are the leaders in 

introducing new forms of quotatives. 

If this hypothesis is correct, the question remains of how be like reached 

teenagers in Glasgow. It is unlikely to have been through direct contact with 

young Americans, though in these days of increased transatlantic tra c this 

cannot be ruled out. It is also possible that the middle-class girls heard it from 

their older siblings, who might be students of the kind studied by Tagliamonte 

and Hudson. Since undergraduates are more often from middle-class backgrounds 

this would account for the social di€erences in the use of these forms. 

Finally, it is also possible that the transmission is through the medium of ®lm 

and television. Dougherty and Strassel examined 11 ®lms released between 

1983 and 1997 that had at least one quotative. Their results are given in 

Figure 6 showing quite clearly the decrease in the use of go and the corresponding 

rise in the use of be like in these ®lms that are mainly teen and collegeage 

oriented. Like the spread of glottal stops in England and dialect levelling in 

general, it is possible that the innovation in quotatives among Glasgow teenagers 

owes something to the media. 


18 

60 

50 

40 

30 

20 

10 

0 

1983-89 1990-95 

5. CONCLUSION 

The Glasgow tapes give clear evidence that the quotatives go and be like are used 

more freely by younger speakers in Britain than the undergraduates in 

Tagliamonte and Hudson's study. Of the non-traditional quotatives, the 

adults' preference is for go, and that mainly among the working-class women. 

The occurrence of mixed forms such as go like that and be like that suggests either 

the evolution of the be like quotative or that there has been some distortion in 

the transmission process. The sociolinguistic investigation of discourse features 

is still at a very elementary stage Macaulay forthcoming) and there is very little 

historical depth available for such aspects of speech, so that any hypotheses 

about the transmission of usages such as the be like quotative are very tentative. 

More attention to archival media materials e.g. Dougherty and Strassel 1998; 

Elliott 2000 a, b; Sanko€ forthcoming) might be very helpful in charting the 

progress of changes. More data from a wider range of speakers on the use of 

quotatives, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is also needed. 

NOTES 

go 

be like 

Figure 6: Percentage of two quotatives in 11 ®lms 1983±97 

MACAULAY 

1996-98 

1. I am grateful to Sali Tagliamonte, Stephanie Strassel, Nik Coupland, and an 

anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks 

also to Jane Stuart-Smith who organized the whole project in which the sessions were 

recorded, and then to her assiduous assistants who transcribed the tapes: Cerwyss 

Ower, Claire Timmins, Kathryn Allen, Lesley Eadie, and Susan Bannatyne, especially 

the ®rst two. 



2. A pilot study of English novels revealed a pattern of gender stereotyping in the use of 

graphic verbs and evaluative adverbs. 

Used only of men Used only of women 

said ®rmly said quietly 

said bluntly asked innocently 

said coldly echoed obediently 

said smugly said loyally 

urged o€ered humbly 

burst forth whispered 

demanded aggressively asked mildly 

said challengingly agreed placidly 

cried furiously smiled complacently 

exclaimed contemptuously fumbled on 

cried portentously implored 

grumbled pleaded 

Macaulay 1994: 96) 

These examples come from a paper by Nan Wonderly when she was an undergraduate 

at Pomona College. 

3. Judging from some of the examples in Holmes 1997), go has reached New Zealand. 

4. Although the project was not designed to collect information for discourse analysis, 

the data set is very rich and provides useful material for the quantitative analysis of 

age, gender, and social class di€erences in the use of various discourse features 

Macaulay 1999). My stimulus for looking at quotatives came from reading 

Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). 

5. A third of the zero quotatives occur in the telling of a joke by one of the working-class 

boys. The context makes the use of a quotative unnecessary, as can be seen in the 

following extract: 

the priest says to them `What is it you want?' 

he goes `Can we get a home for the night and some food possibly warm 

father?' 

he goes `Fair enough fair enough come on in' 

he goes `What religion are you?' to the ®rst boy 

ˆ) Ì'm a catholic father' 

ˆ) `Come on in 

there's a mat 

warm yourself by the ®re' 

ˆ) walks up to the second boy Ànd what religion are you?' 

ˆ) Ì'm a catholic father' 

ˆ) `Come on in 

there's a mat 

warm yourself by the ®re' 

ˆ) walks up to the third boy Ànd what religion are you son?' 

ˆ) Ì'm a prodestant father' 

ˆ) Ìn the name of God I won't turn you away blanket in the corner' 

6. Miller and Weinert 1995) examine the discourse functions of like, which has a long 

history in Scotland, but they found no examples of quotative like in conversations 

recorded in 1977±1980. The focus function of like in the Glasgow conversations will 

be examined in a later paper. 


20 

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Address correspondence to: 

Ronald Macaulay 

Pitzer College 

Claremont 

California 91711±6101 

U.S.A. 

ronald_macaulay@pitzer.edu

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