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

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.
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001