Children’s Use of Vernacular Functions of 'like' in Peer Conversation

Abstract

Much recent research has described the ongoing development of vernacular functions of English like as a discourse marker (Like they're trying to be discreet about it) or discourse particle (Maybe it's like a girl thing) and as part BE+like quotative construction (He's like "I don't want to work until later"). For example, D'Arcy (2005) shows that discourse like, originally a clause-initial discourse marker, developed over apparent time into a discourse particle adjoined to determiner phrases (DP) and then generalized to verb phrases (VP) and a variety of other syntactic contexts inside the clause; and Tagliamonte and D'Arcy (2007) describe a reorganization of the quotative system to include BE+like as an introducer of reported thought and inner dialogue. While this research has made it possible to characterize broader patterns of development in the 'community' grammar, comparatively little is known about how speakers acquire this variable. This study examines young children's use of the word like as a discourse marker or discourse particle, and a quotative marker, to work toward a better understanding of how these functions of like are incorporated into maturing grammars.Most existing research has looked at like primarily in the speech of adults and teenagers. However, D'Arcy (2005) included a 10-12-year-old age group and Levey (2006) has looked at 7-8 and 10-11-year-olds; it appears that many children are fairly prolific like users by these ages.In this study I look five child age groups, 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, and 10-year-olds. The focus is on the four younger age groups, which fill a gap in the existing research, and cover the period during which the use of like presumably develops. The 10-year-olds are included to serve as a comparison with existing research. Data come from recorded interactions between pairs of children of the same age, one pair of boys and one pair of girls at each of the five age groups. Each pair was recorded four times, for 30 minutes per recording sessions. Comparison data from conversations between six pairs of college-aged adults are drawn from a previously existing corpus.All tokens of like that functioned as a discourse marker, discourse particle, or quotative marker were extracted. Tokens of discourse like were further coded for the syntactic constituent they adjoined to. Tokens of like functioning as an approximative adverb, as well as the more standard functions as a verb, preposition, etc., were excluded from the current analysis. This paper focuses primarily on discourse like: when discourse like appears in children's speech, the syntactic positions in which it appears, and how tokens of discourse like are distributed across different syntactic contexts. It also looks at gender differences in children's use of like and briefly considers younger children's use of like in quotative constructions.None of the 3-year-olds was observed to use discourse like, though one girl used a single token of like in a quotative construction. All of the girls age 4 and older used like. It was rare, tho...