Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: effects of function, context and predictability

Abstract

This study examines sociophonetic variation in different functions oflikeamong adolescents in London and Edinburgh. It attempts to determine the factors that may explain this variation. Our results suggest that the function oflikecorrelates primarily with contextual factors, rather than the phonetic factors of vowel quality, /l/ to vowel duration and /k/ realisation. In particular, the preceding and following segments and their bigram predictability emerge as highly significant, in addition to the boundary strength followinglike. In both London and Edinburgh, the vowel appears to be the only non-contextual feature that is sensitive to the function oflike: quotativebe likeis more likely to be monophthongised than other functions oflike. We argue that the more monophthongal nature of quotativelikeis due to the syntactic and prosodic context in which it occurs.