Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

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Find out what you can about innit? – who uses it, in what contexts and

how it developed in English? Why do you think it’s so popular?

9.

One of the most rapid linguistic changes that linguists have researched is

the use of ‘be like’ to report speech or thought as in (a) and (b) below:

(a) and she was like ‘no way, get out of here!’

(b) and I’m like ‘yuck’!

It appears to have emerged first in the United States and has spread

rapidly to many other Englishes – including in Britain, Australia and

New Zealand. Many have suggested that its rapid spread is due to the

media, especially American soap operas like Friends and Sex in the City.

Research on ‘be like’ by the sociolinguist Isa Buchstaller suggests,

however, that the social distribution of ‘be like’ and the stereotypes

and attitudes attached to its use in England differ quite markedly from

those in the United States. In the latter, ‘be like’ is both used by and

stereotyped as being associated with young women. In England, it is

actually used slightly more by men in Buchstaller’s study. Furthermore,

she found that British speakers only stereotype ‘be like’ as being asso-

ciated with young people and not with a particular gender or social class,

and more than half of the British people she asked in a social attitudes

questionnaire had ‘no idea’ about which place ‘be like’ came from.

Given this research, how do you think ‘be like’ has spread to Britain

and to other Anglophone countries? Why do you think it is used and

stereotyped differently in Britain and the United States?

Further reading and references

St rai ght forw ard i nt roduct ions to some of t he m at eri al i n sections 9, 10 and 11 ca n be found in Haspelmath (2002), Coat es ( 2003) and A ronoff a nd Fude ma n (2005).

Introduct ions s pec if ica ll y ge ared towa rds Engli sh m orphology i ncl ude Ka ta mba

(1994), Carstairs-McCarthy (2002) and Harley (2006). More deta il ed surve ys of morphol ogy are gi ven in Kat am ba (1993), Bauer ( 2003) and Booi j (2005). Carstairs-Mc Ca rth y ( 1992) provides a good overvi ew of the se i ssues, a nd Spence r ( 1991, chapt ers 1 and 2) gi ves deta il s of many of t he phenomena di sc ussed. Mat the ws

(1991), though tough goi ng in pl ac es for begi nne rs , provides i nt erest ing insight s int o morphol ogy. F or m ore a dva nced di sc ussi on of some of the topi cs of t he se s ect ions, se e the chapt ers by S tump (Infl ec ti on), Bea rd (Der ivat ion) , F abb (Compoundi ng), Hal pe rn (Cli tic s) , Spence r (Morphophonol ogi ca l O perat ions) i n S pe ncer and Zwic ky ( 1998).

Saeed ( 2003) is a comprehensive introduction to many topics in semantics.

Chapter 3 is devoted to word meaning and reviews much of the material covered here. A very readable introduction to the use of entailment in studying lexical semantic relations is Cruse (1986), which acknowledges a considerable debt to Lyons (1977, particularly chapters 8 and 9). Arguments against the usefulness of definitions for understanding how meanings are composed can be found in Fodor

(1981) and Fodor, Garrett, Walker and Parkes (1980), neither of which is easy to read for beginners. One of the earliest, and most accessible, attempts to argue for the importance of prototypes in the study of meaning is Rosch (1973).

Discussions of the remarkable rate of children’s word acquisition appear in

Carey (1978, 1985), and Bloom (2000) is a major review of the issues surrounding the development of word meanings, including a number of novel proposals.

Valian (1986) is a study of syntactic categorisation in early stages of acquisition, while Radford (1990) was among the first to systematically examine children’s difficulties with functional categories. Berko (1958) studied productive morphological processes in children, and Brown (1973) reports the order of morpheme acquisition discussed in the text. There are many discussions of the overregularisation of the English past tense -ed; among the most notable are Kuczaj (1977), Bybee and Slobin (1982) and Marcus (1995). Marcus, et al. Pinker, Ullman

(1992) is an extended, non-introductory discussion of overregularisation.

Gordon (1985) reports the results on pluralisation of compounds, and a fairly recent study, exploring alternative explanations for this sort of finding is Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003). The classic account of children’s word 242

Further reading and references

243

meanings as sets of perceptual features is Clark (1973), and the importance of the basic object level in children’s initial categorisations is examined in Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson and Boyes-Braem (1976).

Further discussion of the process of visual and spoken word recognition

(introduced in section 14), including relevant experimental evidence, can be found in Harley (2001, section C) and in Ingram (2007, chapters 5–7).

Technical terms relevant for lexical processing are explained in Field (2004,

150–61). The issues we have raised in connection with the representation of

words in the mental lexicon are largely based on Levelt (1989, chapter 6).

For section 15, Ahlsén (2006, chapters 5 and 6). Ingram (2007, chapter 11) is also worth consulting. The discussion of agrammatism contains materials and is based on ideas from Grodzinsky (1990). Further explanation of relevant terms such as Specific Language Impairment, function-word processing, agrammatism, etc. can be found in Field (2004). Leonard (1998, chapters 2 and 3) provides an overview of research into SLI, focusing on English. The materials we rely on in our discussion are from Gopnik (1990).

Both Trask (1996) and McMahon (1994) provide good detail about borrowing and lexical, semantic and morphological variation and change. Research on register can be found in Biber and Finegan (1994). The study on lexical change in New Zealand English, referred to in section 16, was conducted by Meyerhoff (1993). The research on second dialect acquisition of lexical items was carried out by Chambers (1992) and that on lexical attrition in East Anglia by Britain (forthcoming). Further information about the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English can be found at www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/research/corpora/wcs.aspx. The studies of the use of (ing) in Sydney, Wellington and Norwich come from Horvath (1985), Bell and Holmes (1992) and Trudgill (1974, 1988), respectively. The research on (ing) as a morphological variable can be found in Houston (1991), and Ash and Myhill (1986)

investigated the relationship between ethnicity, social network strength and the use of African American morphological features. The work on quotative ‘be like’ was conducted by Buchstaller (2005).

PA RT I I I

Sentences

17

Introduction

In this final part of the book, we switch our attention to the study of syntax, focusing on the processes whereby words are combined to form phrases which in turn are combined to form sentences. With many linguists, we share the view that sentences constitute the ‘largest’ objects which fall under the generative approach to linguistics we are pursuing and that the structure of phrases and sentences is revealing of important aspects of human cognition.. Of course, this is not to say that there are no ‘larger’ linguistic objects worth studying, nor that the use of sentences in interaction is not of intrinsic interest. Such larger objects as conversations, discourses, stories and texts are, without doubt, structured, and, indeed, research into these areas has sometimes assumed that some notion of ‘grammar’ is applicable to them. This may be so, but we believe that any such ‘grammar’ will have a very different form to what we are considering here and will have to take account of a wide range of factors which extend beyond the knowledge of language. To take just one simple example, consider the two-turn conversation in (220): (220)