Going global and sounding local

Abstract

We chart the incursion of quotative be like into Dublin English, drawing comparisons with similar developments in urban Canadian English as well as with diachronic benchmarks representing vernacular Irish English. Quantitative analysis reveals that be like is the lead variant in the quotative system used by young Dubliners and is advancing along a similar, though not identical, cline of grammaticalization to that found in urban Canadian English. We use the resultant information about the Dublin English quotative system as a baseline to assess the extent to which this system has been acquired by Polish-born L2 speakers of English differentiated in terms of target language proficiency. Comparison of the L2 quotative system with the L1 Dublin English benchmark reveals that not all L1 usage constraints are faithfully replicated by L2 speakers, indicating that the acquisition of the relevant constraints is incomplete, even in the case of advanced learners.