Older men and younger women

Abstract

This article investigates the effect of the external variables speaker age and sex on the use of the quotatives be like, go, be all, and say in present-day spoken American English. The study is based on a large computerized corpus of naturally-occurring conversation collected from a wide range of speakers across the United States. The results show that there are striking differences in the way that men and women under the age of forty use these quotatives. Young women are in the lead in the use of be like, but the use of this quotative decreases dramatically among women in their late 20s and in their 30s. In contrast, the use of be like increases among men in their late 20s. The patterns of use described here represent a departure from previous findings and suggest that the effect of speaker's age and sex on quotative use is more complex than has been posited so far.

Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1

“…A tremendous amount of research has documented the rise of quotative like in numerous English varieties (cf. Barbieri 2005, 2007; Tagliamonte and D'Arcy 2004, for recent reviews), while less is known on the usage of ‘discourse’ like , that is the use of like as discourse marker.…”

Windows on the mind

“…Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999: 155, Macaulay 2001, Buchstaller 2002, Barbieri 2007, the quotative expressions annotated in the NC include SAY, THINK, GO, like (the latter both with and without preceding BE), and also ASK and TELL; the tag QOO was included for any other quotative. Tagsets for quotatives contain five values for each quotative (except for like without preceding BE and QOO).…”

Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

“…In Rayson, Leech, and Hodges (1997:137), a BNC-based study, said ranked third in the list of words most "characteristic" of female speech, while in the corresponding male-speech list no quotative verb was included. Stenström, Andersen, and Hasund (2002:126), working on COLT, found that "the girls use more quotative verbs than the boys," while Barbieri (2007), working on data from the American English Conversation component of the Longman Spoken and Written English corpus (Biber et al 1999), found strikingly higher rates of quotative usage among young females up to age twenty-six and females older than forty (only men aged twentyseven to forty scored higher than women of that age group). Note: NFm = normed frequency/1,000 utterances by men; NFf = normed frequency/1,000 utterances by women; coeff.…”

“…16 It is further well known that age, class, and region also play crucial roles in how speech is differentiated socially. Barbieri (2007), for example, demonstrates how the parameters age and sex subtly interact in the use of quotatives in American English. Stenström, Andersen, and Hasund (2002) examine London teenage "slanguage" (Stenström, Andersen, and Hasund's cover term for slang, swearing, and vague language) and the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background on its use.…”

“…Schmid (2003:186) studies conversational behavior and the use of semantic fields "across the male and female cultures." Barbieri (2007) investigates the effects of speaker age and sex on the use of quotatives in American English, McEnery and Xiao (2004) explore swearing in the British National Corpus (BNC), and Rühlemann (2007) includes a number of sociolinguistic analyses of conversational features. Xiao and Tao (2007) is a sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English, and Barbieri (2008) explores age-based linguistic variation in spontaneous American conversation.…”