The document summarizes research on the use of quotatives in Twitter communication in the United Kingdom. It finds that: 1) The zero quotative (Ø) and "say" were the most commonly used quotatives overall. 2) There was no relationship between the city a tweet originated from and the quotative used. 3) Quotative choice did vary based on the topic of the tweet, with "be like" more common for personal/social topics. 4) The overall frequency of quotatives was very low, appearing in only 1.14% of tweets analyzed.

1. British quotative
use on
Twitter.
24 June
2015
Sarah Maclean-Morris | Ingrid van Alphen | UvA

2. Why Twitter?
Overview.
Research Qs.
Results
Summary & Eval.
Questions
Quotatives?
2

3. “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

4. 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

5. Quotatives?
However No research as of yet on
quotative use in CMC.
5

6. PublicallyAccessible CMCOral culturexwrittenmedium
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
WhyTwitter?
6

7. 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
Yes
Relationship between Twitter’s character restriction
and the non-lexical zero quotative?
ResearchQuestions& Hypotheses..
7

8. Cardiff
Population: Approx. 350,000
Largest Age Group: 18-24 (18.5%)
Population Density: 2470 per km2
Literature: NONE
Glasgow
Population: 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)
York
Population: Approx. 200,000
Largest Age Group: 18 – 24
(14.0 %)
Population Density: 27
Literature: be like
(Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999,
Durham et al. 2012)
8

9.  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 & Sport
Technology & Social Media
Food, Drink, Lifestyle & Culture
Ambiguous/Other
MethodandDataCollection.
9

10. 32
43
8 2200
zero
say
be like
think
Other
go
17
13
5
2
2 1
27.3 % 12.5%
25.7% 34.5%
Results:ByLocation
London York
Glasgow
3632
3 6 4 10
58
31
9 6 3 3
Cardiff
10

11. Results:ByLocation.
Summary: By Location
• Similar trends in all four cities
• Zero & Say most popular quotatives:
Say, London
Zero, Glasgow, York & Cardiff
• This is + NP not present
• Go infrequent, no appearance in
London
• No relationship between quotative
choice and location.
11

12. Results:By Topic
36
32
21
11
0
4
2
0 0
5
3 3
6
2
0
33
25
23
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Personal & Social Experience News & Current Affairs TV, Sports and
Entertainment
Twitter Quotative Use by Topic:
3 most popular topics
say be like go think other zero
12

13. 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

14. Research Question Hypothesis
No* 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*

15. Summary.
2
3
4
5
Near absence ofgo inTwitter: Retraction?
Relationship between topic & quotative choice
No relationship between quotative use and city
1
Higher frequency of zero quotatives
Say most popular lexical quotative
6
Low overall frequency of quotatives in
corpus: 1.14% of 28,000 messages
15

16. • 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

17. Evaluation.
Thankyou for your
attention, and to those
who supported me
during my thesis.
17

18. Evaluation.
Questions?
18

19. 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): 215-227
Butters, R. (1980) Narrative Go ‘Say’. American Speech, 55(4): 304-307
Buchstaller, 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

20. 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. 21
Additional.
This is you @nameremoved
This is you @NAME, “Although I’m 25, I’m so excited about my new goldfish :p”