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

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 `Oh well that's good that's good Gran'
d. And I went `Oh it's my mum'
e. I says `Well will that mean that men get into the car-park?'
She went `I would think so'
f. I said `You'd better phone John'
she went `Aye'
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 `Eurgh'
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
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001