초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study investigates the use of the discourse marker (DM) like in the corpus of British English conversation: the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014), which was compiled in the mid-2010s. A frequency analysis of like is presented, along with its distributional differences among different age groups and its functions as a DM. The findings reveal that like as a DM rather than a verb, preposition or conjunction occurs most frequently, and that its frequency is significantly higher than that in the previous studies based on the corpora compiled in the early 1990s. Furthermore, the DM like is found to be highly frequent in the utterances of the 20s and 30s age groups. As regards the function of like, it appears to be used predominantly as a focus marker, introducing salient or new information. The form of BE+like as a quotation marker is found to have become more grammaticalized than in the 1990s. The functional distribution among age groups demonstrates significant differences in the focusing, quotation, and hedging functions. Based on these results, possible implications for English language teaching are considered.
