A Study On New Quotative Be Like From The Perspective Of Variation Theory

Nowadays be like has turned into a widely-used quotative since its emergence inthe1980s. So much work has been done on the study of quotative be like in the past30years or since Butters(1982) first noted the use of be like as a dialogue introducer. Inaddition, the innovation has commanded attention from a variety of perspectives. Fromthe perspective of sociolinguistics, Isabelle Buchstaller and Alexandra D’arcy（2009）conducted a multi-local, multivariate analysis of be like in comparable datasets fromthree discontinuous geographic settings: the U.S.A., England, and New Zealand.Federica Barbieri (2009) investigates quotative use in American English in apparent andreal time. Suzanne Romaine and Deborah Lange(1991) analyzed the grammaticalizationof like from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics. From the perspective ofcognitive linguistics, Lieven Vandelanotte and Kristin Davidse(2009) wrote an article toinvestigate the structural assembly and semantics of innovative quotatives such as belike, be all and go in English. Li Shujing(2010) wrote a paper to study the formationmechanism of all-purpose quotative be like from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.After presenting literature review, this thesis introduces theoretical basis ofsociolinguistic. In the following, this paper analyzes the use of be like in terms ofgender, age, content of the quote, socio-economic status based on the variation theoryso as to see how the quotative be like change over time around a series of socialvariables. The findings of this thesis suggests that be like is used most frequently in thecolloquial speech of adolescents and young adults under30. In addition, sex effects,well known for their critical contribution to linguistic change, have also beenimplicated with ongoing development of be like. Women favors the usage of be likemore than men. The use of be like is also affected by socio-economic classTo sum up, this thesis makes a tentative analysis on the usage of be like from theperspective of variation theory in sociolinguistics and explores the usage of quotative belike in terms of speaker gender, age, content of quote and socio-economic class. This thesis intends to compare the corpus data from the present study with data from a corpuscollected in the previous research so as to provide important information on quotativeuse in present-day English and contribute to our understanding of quotative use inpresent-day, and improving the language teaching and learning, of course, language useas well.