The Rise of 'Like' in Spontaneous Quotations

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of said versus like as enquoting devices. The greater use of like is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no evidence that like's increase in use corresponds to an increasing desire to explicitly indicate slippage between the words used in a report and those of the original source. Instead, like can substitute for said and be used in more environments, selectively depicting aspects of the original quote (Clark & Gerrig, 1990; Wade & Clark, 1993)