Tuesday, 2 March 2004
Noon, Greenberg Room (460-126)
Note special day and time

Innovation and Reallocation in the Quotative System -- A Cross-variety Aproach

Isabelle Buchstaller

University of Edinburgh

The intrusion of innovations into a hitherto stable set of variants -- here the (say) variable -- presents the opportunity to investigate the orderly restructuring of all variants as new ones come in. In this talk, I will discuss how the quotative system as a whole reacts to the intrusion of newcomer variants, "like" and "go". I use quantitative and qualitative methods to explore questions such as:

(i)   Do new variants simply get added to the system or do they drive out older forms?  
(ii)  Which extralinguistic and intralinguistic constraints are involved?  
(iii) Do US English and British English pattern alike?

A cross-variety comparison gives me the opportunity to investigate to what extent we can generalize our findings. The comparison of pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors reveals that while both USE and BrE have generally reacted to the new variants in the same way, there are nevertheless some interesting but subtle differences in the development of "go" and "like" in different locales. This raises more fundamental linguistic issues such as whether we are indeed comparing the same variable in the US and Britain. In addition, the social constraints on quotative like and go are not the same in both varieties. British speakers appear not to have borrowed the social information associated with like in USE along with the surface form. My findings provide evidence of the restructuring of the quotative system as a whole that accompanies the incursion of a newcomer variant, like. There is evidence of a global trend, but with a localized slant to it.