The discourse marker LIKE in Irish English
MyBook is a cheap paperback edition of the original book and will be sold at uniform, low price.
Abstract
This paper analyses the use of the discourse marker LIKE in Irish English (IrE) with respect to a speaker’s age and gender and illustrates how the International Corpus of English (ICE) can be used for fine-grained sociolinguistic analyses. The results suggest that LIKE use significantly decreases as speakers exceed their mid-thirties and that all variants of LIKE undergo changes which are, however, restricted to younger speakers. Keywords: Discourse marker LIKE; sociolinguistics; linguistic variation; language change; gender; age; ICE Ireland; quantitative analysis
