Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight Hundred Years of Like

Studies in Language Companion #187

by Alexandra D'Arcy

Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like , each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

255 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2017

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