Tesis profesional presentada por María José Ortíz Pérez [maria.ortizpz@udlap.mx]

Licenciatura en Idiomas. Departamento de Lenguas. Escuela de Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de las Américas Puebla.

Jurado Calificador

Presidente: Dra. Myrna Elizabeth Iglesias Barrón
Secretario y Director: Dr. Antonio Rico Sulayes
Vocal: Mtra. Patricia Ann McCoy Baballe

Cholula, Puebla, México a 17 de mayo de 2016.

Resumen

Research has shown that quoting people is an important tool for a number of language tasks, such as telling stories. In these tasks, quotatives allow the narrator to express what the individuals involved in a conversation were saying, doing, and even thinking. Among the several quotatives in the English language, be like has shown to be one of the dominant ones, but research has only focused on a comparison between be like and other quotatives, such as go and be all. This study in particular aims at exploring two of the uses for quotative be like, reporting: actual spoken dialogue or internal thought. In order to do this, a massive American English corpus with a wide coverage was used to collect the data.

Palabras clave: quotatives, be like, corpus linguistics, American English, direct speech, reported speech, internal thought.

Table of content

Portada (archivo pdf, 13 kb)

Índices (archivo pdf, 185 kb)

Capítulo 1. Introduction (archivo pdf, 274 kb)

  • 1.2 Research questions
  • 1.3 Structure of the thesis

Capítulo 2. Literature Review (archivo pdf, 304 kb)

  • 2.1 Quotatives
  • 2.2 Corpus linguistics

Capítulo 3. Methodology (archivo pdf, 216 kb)

  • 3.1 Data further selection
  • 3.2 Categories and criteria
  • 3.3 Limitations
  • 3.4 Data collection
  • 3.5 Procedure
  • 3.6 Sections

Capítulo 4. Results (archivo pdf, 994 kb)

  • 4.1 General
  • 4.2 Be like as a quotative
  • 4.3 By tense (I was like / He was like / She was like)
  • 4.4 By person

Capítulo 5. Discussion & Conclusion (archivo pdf, 285 kb)

  • 5.1 Predominance of quotatives in like
  • 5.2 Be like ? Direct Speech and Internal Thought
  • 5.3 Influence of grammatical tense on be like as a quotative
  • 5.4 Influence of grammatical person on be like as a quotative
  • 5.5 Future research
  • 5.6 Conclusion

Referencias (archivo pdf, 207 kb)

Apéndice A. Corpus of Contemporary (archivo pdf, 217 kb)

Apéndice B. Source Information (archivo pdf, 111 kb)

Ortíz Pérez, M. J. 2016. A corpus based study of the evolution of be like as a quotative to report either direct speech or internal thought in American English. Tesis Licenciatura. Idiomas. Departamento de Lenguas, Escuela de Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de las Américas Puebla. Mayo. Derechos Reservados © 2016.