Remarkable U.S. English LIKE on a university campus : non-native usage, judgments, and attitudes

"Remarkable (D'Arcy, 2017) LIKE usages in English (i.e., as discourse marker/particle, quotative complementizer or approximator) comprise one of the 'hot topics' of discourse-pragmatic research, but few studies have included L2 speakers (Diskin, 2017; Liao, 2009; Liu, 2016) and none of them looked at non-native attitudes or naturalness judgments. The current dissertation examined rLIKE as perceived, used and reflected upon by 26 NNSs -- international students on a university campus with an average U.S. residence length greater than 40 months. Multiple data collection methods were used (interviews, syntactic judgment and matched-guise experiments); native speaker data collected via online questionnaire and from a local speech corpus were used for linguistic behavior, belief and attitude comparison. Results revealed that, despite a high level of within-group variation, NNSs behave native-like when using LIKE (token distribution across functions was similar for NSs and NNSs) and mostly native-like when judging naturalness of sentences containing LIKE in various syntactic positions. In addition to length of residence, beliefs about LIKE emerged as a factor influencing usage frequency in L2 speech: NNSs who perceived LIKE as specifically American were likely to use it often to signal belonging to the American English-speaking community. However, NNSs' level of stylistic awareness was low: most did not recognize LIKE as a stigmatized vernacular element that NSs prefer to avoid in formal situations. The attitude pattern (judgments about speakers using/not using LIKE) displayed by NNSs, however, was based on perceived social personae of speakers and native-like."--Page ii.