He goes and I'm like: the new quotatives re-visited

Isabelle Buchstaller

In every-day discourse be like and go occur, apart from their established uses, as quotatives. Several studies have tried to postulate models for like's development, all of which rely on the postulate of undirectionality in grammaticalization. I propose a synchronic field model (Lakoff 1987) for like, an interrelated net of semantic-pragmatic pathways that are cross-linguistically sustained. This radial structure model can account for the co-existence of various uses centering around and linked by a core meaning (cf. Lichtenberk 1991).

Using quantitative data drawn from the LDC corpus of spoken American English, I evaluate the pragmatic, semantic, and discourse aspects of be like's and go's functions and give motivations for the grammaticalization they are undergoing. I will quantitatively and qualitatively examine

their pragmatic uses especially with reference to the notion of a continuum of hypotheticality (Vincent and Dubois 1994)
their role within the quotative system and possible priming `birds of a feather' effects (Scherre et al. 1991)
their `delivery aspects', enquoted non- or para-linguistic features (Clark and Gerrig 1990)

The fact that be like and go have taken on important functions shows that they have functional and social significance. This finding provides evidence against earlier claims that like and go are pleonastic intruders into a stable paradigm of reporting devices.