Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
Table 4 (continued)
Pattern 4. Low nonstandard score, high recognition rate, individual towns:
Recessive Hull feature (absent in south):
7 zero def. article 6 38 50 0 69 100
non-st. score 0 0 9.5
Recessive Reading feature (absent in MK and Hull):
8 pres. tense -s 100 13 0 0 0 0
non-st. score 12 0 0
Pattern 5. Recognition of ‘old’ discourse marker clause-final like and ‘new’
focus marker medial like:
Reading Milton
Hull
Keynes
Item Feature WC MC WC MC WC MC
No.
9 clause final
like
10 focus marker
like
0 13 0 0 13 25
100 100 75 100 94 100
Finally in this discussion of data from the English adolescents, we
return to Cheshire’s (1996) claim that some non-standard features occur in
interactionally prominent, or salient positions, owing to the fact that nonstandard
varieties are developed in face-to-face interaction. The final feature
we consider has a discourse function. It is not a variable as ordinarily
conceived, because of the difficulty of establishing semantic or even
functional equivalence for possible variants. This is the focus marker like,
shown under Pattern 5 in Table 4. First, we can note the uniformly high
recognition rate. It is a new feature, widespread in the English-speaking
world, and not surprisingly it is used by all the adolescent groups in the
sample (Cheshire, Gillett, Kerswill & Williams 1999). Anecdotal evidence
suggests that it is commented upon, and criticised, by many adults. This
marker has obvious interactional functions, including encoding the degree of
importance to be placed on the proposition which it precedes, expressing the
speaker’s orientation towards and commitment to the truth of the proposition,
and (in the form be like – see Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999) as a quotative.
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