The Use of Discourse Marker 'Like' by Non-Native Speakers of English

ABSTRAK Fatiani, Tisyrinul. 2018.The Use of Discourse Marker ‘Like’ by Non-Native Speakers of English. Thesis, Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Universitas Negeri Malang. Advisors: (I)Prof. Dr. Yazid Basthomi, M.A. (II)Dr. Suharyadi, S.Pd., M.Pd. Key words: Discourse markers, ‘like’, corpus data A number of researchers have continuously done studies on discourse markers (DMs). One of the importantissues are use of discourse marker ‘like’ among native and non-native speakers of English (NNSE). However, despite the previous studies on the use of ‘like’, we do not have enough understanding on the use of ‘like’among non-native speakers of English that is evidenced in corpus data. Therefore, this study aims to provide textual evidence on the use of ‘like’ among the non-native speakers. To do the study, corpus data on discourse marker ‘like’ by NNSE were collected from Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). It is one of the largest freely-available corpus of English storing nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech. To identify the use of ‘like’, a framework of functional categories of ‘like’ provided by Diskin (2017) was used in this study. To analyze and present the data, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was used. The findings show that from the collected 433 entries, six primary functions of ‘like’ proposed by Diskin (2017) are evident in the data. Illustrator is the most frequent use of like with 173 entries (39.96%), followed by filler with 107 entries(24.71%), like as part of speech with referential meaning with 76 entries (17.55%), and approximative adverb with 48 entries (11.00%). This supports a study conducted by Diskin (2017) stating that these categories are considered as the most common use of ‘like’ with no major differences of use among the non-native speakers of English and the native speakers. In addition, other functional categories of ‘like’ found in the corpus data include exemplifier with 19 entries (4.38%), mitigator with 6 entries (1.38%), and self-corrector with 4 entries (0.92%). Furthermore, in line with Diskin’s (2017) findings,‘like’as mitigator is a discourse-pragmatic marker that significantly belongs to the native speakers meaning that it requires more efforts of adaptation for the non-native speakers to adopt this use of ‘like’. As such, this functional category is found to be the least frequent use of like in this study. The results of this study provide a textual evidence of previous studies on the use of discourse-pragmatic marker ‘like’among non-native speakers of English. For future research, the analysis is suggested to include data from various sources of corpus data. In addition, it is also suggested that future researchers interested in conducting a study with the similar focus can further explore internal and external factors possible to influence the use of ‘like’among NNSE