Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context

“A treasure trove of illustrative examples and insightful analyses of that ubiquitous, pesky, little element like in all its different guises and a must-read for all researchers interested in discourse-pragmatic variation.”

“With this book, Alexandra D’Arcy has produced the definitive reference work on like. Pulling together decades of research, she teases apart like’s many functions and weaves together their histories to draw a rich, multi-layered picture of how the word has systematically expanded its functional scope over centuries. Along the way, the book usefully tackles myth after myth about the newness, ‘wrongness,’ femaleness, and randomness of like, a word that has so captured the popular imagination.”

“Alexandra D’Arcy has written an impressive and highly readable account of like based on an exceptionally rich set of historical and contemporary vernacular spoken data. With anexemplary clarity of prose and a conscientious approach to empirical data, the author sheds fresh light on diachrony and patterns of synchronic variation, convincingly detailing the developmental cline of the discourse marker and discourse particle and providing accurate timing of the emergence of new functions and contexts of use. This is certainly among the most enlightening work on like that I have read. Truly fascinating and a joy to read.”

“Even so, the book as a whole is thorough and efficient. It acknowledges and describes many forms of ''like'', but analyses two specific forms in depth. The analysis draws on a large set of corpora that cover a relatively long time-span and many anglophone regions. These corpora, the methods of analysing the data, and the reasoning behind this method are described in useful detail. This extends to the grammatical frames that D'Arcy takes as the basis of comparison. These are based in generative analyses which are precise, but are made transparent for those readers who are not familiar with generative grammar (especially functional projections such as nP). This means the analysis is focused and can be followed, and I would not hesitate to recommend this book to students working on ''like'' or on similar discourse-pragmatic forms.[...] D'Arcy may not want to become ''The LIKE Person'' (as she writes in the foreword), but ''Discourse-pragmatic variation in context'' is ''The LIKE Book''.”