Isn’t the perception of LIKE by California college students, like, paradoxical?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.40480Keywords:
LIKE, perception, stigma, gender, social meaning, Valley Girl, stereotype, CaliforniaAbstract
This paper examines how California college students perceive vernacular functions of the word LIKE. It aims at testing the hypothesis that LIKE may potentially induce stigma because it can be perceived as a ‘female’ marker. Four versions of a short text were created from an original source. Texts featured either 30 occurrences of LIKE, 20, 10, or none at all. 123 participants were recruited and were asked to read only one version. They were then asked to rate their perception of the anonymous utterer on six variables: age, pleasantness, friendliness, education, competence, and gender. Finally, they were asked to describe what they associate with the speech style of a stereotypical persona: the Valley Girl. Results suggest that the number of LIKE in a text does not significantly influence the perception of an anonymous utterer, though participants do associate it with Valley Girl speak (Valspeak). Paradoxically, some participants report they despise the word LIKE but no evidence suggests they actually do stigmatize it in the perception study.
References
Addington, D. W. (1968) The relationship of selected vocal characteristics to personality perception. Speech Monographs 35(4): 492–503. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03637756809375599.
Alexander, R. (1982) They’re clothes crazy, fer sure; Valley Girls aren’t just in California. The New York Times. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/15/garden/they-re-clothes-crazy-fer-sure-valley-girls-aren-t-just-in-california.html.
Andersen, G. (2001) Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.84.
Anderson, C. and Kelly, M. (2008) California 1. IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive). Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: https://www.dialectsarchive.com/california-1.
Barbieri, F. (2007) Older men and younger women: A corpus-based study of quotative use in American English. English World-Wide 28(1): 23–45. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.28.1.03bar.
Blyth, C., Jr., Recktenwald, S. and Wang, J. (1990) I’m like, ‘Say what?!’: A new quotative in American oral narrative. American Speech 65: 215–227. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/455910.
Bucholtz, M., Bermudez, N., Fung, V., Edwards, L., and Vargas, R. (2007) Hella nor Cal or totally so Cal? The perceptual dialectology of California. Journal of English Linguistics 35(4): 325–352. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424207307780.
Bucholtz, M., Bermudez, N., Fung, V., Vargas, R., and Edwards, L. (2008) The normative North and the stigmatized South: Ideology and methodology in the perceptual dialectology of California. Journal of English Linguistics 36: 62–87. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424207311721.
Buchstaller, I. (2006) Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(3): 362–381. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-6441.2006.00332.x.
Cameron, D. (2003) Gender and language ideologies. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 447–467. Malden: Blackwell. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch19.
Cheshire, J. (2005) Syntactic variation and beyond: Gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9: 479–508. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00303.x.
Coates, J. (2016) Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.
Cohen, J. (1969) Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor & Francis.
Cohen, J. (1992) Statistical power analysis. Current Directions in Psychological Science 1(3): 98–101. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10768783.
CSUN Profiles (2018) Profile 2018. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/profile_2018_0.pdf.
Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2000) The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(1): 60–80. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00103.
D’Arcy, A. (2007) Like and language ideology: Disentangling fact from fiction. American Speech 82(4): 386–419. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2007-025.
D’Arcy, A. (2017) Discourse-pragmatic variation in context: Eight hundred years of like. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.187.
Demers, R. A. and Farmer, A. K. (1986) A linguistics workbook. Cambridge: MIT Press.
D’Onofrio, A. (2016) Social meaning in linguistic perception. PhD Thesis, Stanford University.
Eckert, P. (2003) Language and gender in adolescence. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The handbook of language and gender 381–400. Malden: Blackwell. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/b.9780631225034.2004.00017.x.
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., and Buchner, A. (2007) G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods 39: 175–191. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://www.gpower.hhu.de. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193146.
Fendrich, L. (2010) The Valley-Girl Lift. The chronicle of higher education. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-valley-girl-lift/21780.
Ferrara, K. and Bell, B. (1995) Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be like. American Speech 70(3): 265–290. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/455900.
Fought, C. (2002) California students’ perceptions of, you know, regions and dialects? In D. Long and D. R. Preston (eds) Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Volume 2 113–134. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/z.hpd2.13fou.
Gosset, W. S. (1908) The Probable Error of a Mean. Biometrika 6(1): 1–25. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://seismo.berkeley.edu/~kirchner/eps_120/Odds_n_ ends/Students_original_paper.pdf. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2331554.
Haddican, W., Zweig, E. and Johnson, D. E. (2015) Change in the syntax and semantics of be like quotatives. In T. Biberauer and G. Walkden (eds) Syntax over time: Lexical, morphological, and information-structural interactions 54–71. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199687923.003.0004.
Hinton, L., Moonwomon, B., Bremner, S., Luthin, H., van Clay, M., Lerner, J., and Corcoran, H. (1987) It’s not just the Valley Girls: A study of California English. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 117–128. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v13i0.1811.
Irwin, A. (2002) The construction of identity in the spontaneous conversation of adolescents. Ph.D Thesis, University of Surrey, Roehampton.
Labov, W. (2001) Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors. Malden: Blackwell.
Lipton, L. (1992) After therapy, my Valspeak is still, like, out there. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://articles.latimes.com/1992-12-13/news/vw-3829_1_speech-therapy.
MacNeil, R. and Cran, W. (2005) Do you speak American? A Harvest book. Orlando: Harcourt.
McWhorter, J. H. (2017) Like, why do we use like so much? Lexicon Valley. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/02/john_mcwhorter_with_alexandra_d_arcy_on_the_word_like.html.
Osgood, C., George, E. and Tannenbaum, P. (1957) The measurement of meaning. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Podesva, R. (2011) The California vowel shift and gay identity. American Speech 86(1): 32–51. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1277501.
Podesva, R. (2015) California dialects. Stanford EFS Lectures.
Pratt, T. and D’Onofrio, A. (2017) Jaw setting and the California vowel shift in parodic performance. Language in Society 46(3): 283–312. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000227.
Preston, D. R. (1986) Five visions of America. Language in Society 15(2): 221–240. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500000191.
Preston, D. R. (1996) Where the worst English is spoken. In E. W. Schneider (ed.) Focus on the USA 297–360. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g16.16pre.
Putnam, H. W. (1979) Philosophical papers, volume 2: Mind, language and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quenqua, D. (2012) They’re, like, way ahead of the linguistic curve. The New York Times. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html.
Ricento, T. (2015) Language policy, ideology, and attitudes in English-dominant countries. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron and C. Lucas (eds) The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics 525–544. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Romaine, S. and Lange, D. (1991) The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech 66(3): 227–279. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/455799.
Schourup, L. C. (1982) Quoting with go ‘say’. American Speech 5(2): 148–149. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/454452.
Schourup, L. C. (1985) Common discourse particles in English conversation. New York: Garland.
Siegel, M. (2002) Like: The discourse particle and semantics. Journal of Semantics 19: 35–71. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/19.1.35.
Stuart-Smith, J. and Ota, I. (2014) Media models, ‘the shelf’, and stylistic variation east and west: Rethinking the influence of the media on language variation and change. In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change 127–170. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Suh, K.-H. (2011) The social meanings of discourse markers in Valspeak: Like and totally. Journal of British and American Studies 25: 57–186. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://builder.hufs.ac.kr/user/ibas/download/24_16.pdf.
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2012) Variationist Sociolinguistics Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and D’Arcy, A. (2009) Peaks beyond phonology: Adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language 85(1): 58–108. Retrieved on 19 November 2019 from: http://www.indiana.edu/~lingdept/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Tagl-DArcy-2009-Lnguage.pdf. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0084.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and Hudson, R. (1999) Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147–172. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00070.
Tulloch, S. (ed.) (1991) The Oxford dictionary of new words: A popular guide to words in the news (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Villarreal, D. (2018) The construction of social meaning: A matched-guise investigation of the California vowel shift. Journal of English Linguistics 46(1): 52–78. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424217753520.
Zappa, F. and Zappa, M. U. (1982) Valley Girl: Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch. California: Barking Pumpkin Records.
