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

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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) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001
QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 7 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
Page 1 and 2: Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/1, 20
Page 3: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 5 2) When she
Page 7 and 8: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 9 4) a. And I
Page 9 and 10: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 11 Table 5: D
Page 11 and 12: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 13 In additio
Page 13 and 14: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 15 Imperative
Page 15 and 16: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 17 ment can b
Page 17 and 18: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 19 2. A pilot
Page 19: QUOTATIVES IN GLASGOW 21 Schilling-

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