British quotative use on Twitter.

24 June 2015 Sarah Maclean-Morris | Ingrid van Alphen | UvA

Why Twitter?

Overview.

Research Qs.

Results

Summary & Eval.

Questions

Quotatives?

2

“Hardly any stretch of casual conversational data is without reports of prior speech” ( McCarthy 1998: 150)

Quotatives introduce direct speech and thought using either a verb of ‘saying’ or simply quotation markers (Ø)

Quotatives?

30+Over 30 years of research into innovative constructions. (Milroy and Milroy 1977, Butters 1980, Blyth et al. 1990, Romaine & Lange 1991, Macaulay 2001, Buchstaller 2001 – Present)

3

Quotatives? So I thought, Ah, look at him there, the big, smug, Range Rover driver, I'm not letting him out. […] then I thought, Ah, no, I'll let him out, it'll be – and mark me closely here – it'll be good karma. (Keyes 2014) He’s gonna storm out of there Ø ‘you bastard Peter! You bastard. What, You bastard Peter, you bastard’. (COB132503/179-181 as cited by Palacious Martínez 2013: 447)

I’m like “I thought you were telling me to shut” she goes “shut up, shut up, shut up that means I like what you’re saying keep talking to me.” (Barbieri 2005: 247)

4

Quotatives?

However No research as of yet on quotative use in CMC.

5

Publically Accessible CMCOral culture x written medium

Neography :• Truncations• E• #tags

Conversational Practices

Establishing norms, identity and topicality.

#s. Audience address @

Allows a large data collection via its API without

the need for copyright permission

Why Twitter?

6

Research Question Hypothesis

Is quotative usage on written medium Twitter reflective of quotative use and distribution in spoken discourse?

No: Expected difference between spoken and CMC environments

Preference in certain geographical cities of the United Kingdom to use a specific quotative construction in a user’s online social media communication?

Yes

Relationship between quotative use and topic of a twitter message? Yes

YesRelationship between Twitter’s character restriction and the non-lexical zero quotative?

Research Questions & Hypotheses..

7

Cardiff Population: Approx. 350,000 Largest Age Group: 18-24 (18.5%)Population Density: 2470 per km2

Literature: NONE

GlasgowPopulation: Approx. 600,000 Largest Age Group: 35-44 (14.2%)Population Density: 3,298 per km2

Literature: go, be like that (Macauley 2001)

London (city)Population: Approx. 8,300,000 Largest Age Group: 25-34 (20%) Population Density: 2548 per km2

Literature: This is + NP (Cheshire and Fox 2007)

YorkPopulation: Approx. 200,000 Largest Age Group: 18 – 24 (14.0 %)Population Density: 27Literature: be like (Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999, Durham et al. 2012)

8

Twitter API: delivers sample from overall Twitter public posts.

Filtered by 2x coordinate pairs for each city, language “en” 28,000 Tweets (7,000 x 4 cities): 3 weeks of data.

Mined by quotative variant, like, go, this is + NP, say, think, Ø

319 quotative tokens in total

“Topic” of each tweet coded by 3 independent judges.Personal & Social Experience News & Current Affairs Entertainment, Music & SportTechnology & Social MediaFood, Drink, Lifestyle & CultureAmbiguous/Other

Method and Data Collection.

9

3243

8 22

zero say

be like think

Other go

17

13

5

2 2 1

27.3 % 12.5%

25.7% 34.5%

Results:By LocationLondon York

Glasgow

3632

3 6 4 1

58

31

9 6 3 3Cardiff

10

Results:By Location.

Summary: By Location

• Similar trends in all four cities

• Zero & Say most popular quotatives:

Say, LondonZero, Glasgow, York & Cardiff

• This is + NP not present

• Go infrequent, no appearance in London

• No relationship between quotative choice and location.

11

Results:By Topic

Personal

& Socia

l Exp

erience

News & Curre

nt Affair

s

TV, Sports

and Enterta

inment05

10152025303540 36

32

21

11

042 0 0

5 3 36

2 0

33

25 23

Twitter Quotative Use by Topic: 3 most popular topics

say be like go think other zero

12

Results:By Topic

Summary : By Topic

• Say, think and zero stable across all six categories

• Be like used most often in Personal & Social Experience

• Go present only in three categories.

• Relationship between quotative choice and topic of Tweet

Significant when p < 0.05

13

Research Question HypothesisNo* Both old and new appear but only more established new constructions. Eg. Be like, go. Huge preference for Ø

Is quotative usage on written medium Twitter reflective of quotative use and distribution in spoken discourse?

Preference in certain geographical cities of the United Kingdom to use a specific quotative construction in a user’s online social media communication?

Yes* No relationship between geographical location in the UK and quotative choice

Relationship between quotative use and topic of a twitter message?

Yes*; diff. quotative variants more frequent in diff. semantic topic environments

Yes*: zero construction as main quotative on Twitter suggests so. More research needed

Relationship between Twitter’s character restriction and the non-lexical zero quotative?

Summary.

14

True*, False*, Undetermined*

Summary.

2

3

4

5

Near absence of go in Twitter: Retraction?

Relationship between topic & quotative choice

No relationship between quotative use and city

1

Higher frequency of zero quotativesSay most popular lexical quotative

6

Low overall frequency of quotatives in corpus: 1.14% of 28,000 messages

15

• Low general quotative trend in Twitter.

• Considerably lower population and density of York. Longer to collect 7,000 tweets and less quotatives found. Match cities by similar size?

• Unable to identify writers by age and gender.

• Longer time period of data collection, produce clearer results.

Evaluation.

16

Evaluation.

Thankyou for your attention, and to those who supported me during my thesis.

17

Evaluation.

Questions?

18

Blyth, C. Jr., S. Recktenwald, and J. Wang (1990) I’m like, “Say What?!”: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative. American Speech, 65(3): 215-227Butters, R. (1980) Narrative Go ‘Say’. American Speech, 55(4): 304-307Buchstaller, I.(2002) He goes and I’m like: The new Quotatives re-visited. Paper presented at NWAVE 30, University of North Carolina. (2006) Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 10(3): 362-381. (2008), The Localization of global linguistic variants. English World-Wide. 29(1):15-44. John Benjamin’s Publishing Company. (2011) Quotations across the generations: a multivariate analysis of speech and thought introducers across 5 decades of Tynside speech. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. 7(1): 59-92(2014) Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.Cheshire, J and S. Fox (2007) ‘This is me’ An innovation in waiting and other quotative use among adolescents in London, Paper presented at ICLaVE4, University of Cyprus. June.Durham, M., B. Haddican, E. Zweig, D. E Johnson, Z. Baker, D. Cockeram, E. Danks and L. Tyler (2012) Constant Linguistic Effects in the Diffusion of Be like. Journal of English Linguistics. 40(4): 316-337.Macaulay, R. (2001). You’re like “Why not?” The Quotative Expressions of Glasgow Adolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(1): 3-21. Mathis, T and G. Yule. 1994. Zero Quotatives. Discourse Processes 18:63-76.Tagliamonte, S. and R. Hudson (1999) Be Like et al. beyond America: The Quotative System in British and Canadian Youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 3(2): 147-172

References.

19

This is me

20

Additional.

This is me “Don’t make me mad then tell me to calm down.

That’s like shooting someone then telling them to not bleed.”

21

Additional.This is you @nameremoved

This is you @NAME, “Although I’m 25, I’m so excited about my new goldfish :p”