Discourse marker like has not received much attention during its relatively short history.  Deborah Schiffrin does not even mention it in her 1987 work Discourse markers, and a quick perusal of linguistic or MLA indices turns up only a handful of relevant articles.  Nevertheless, non-standard like (e.g. “She cut her hair like real short” [focus marker] and “He was like, ‘I just can’t believe it’” [quotative complementizer]) proves a fascinating topic of study due to its semantically productive role in oral discourse.

Because so little has been written on this topic, I decided in this study to analyze the various ways in which two college-age Anglo females weave non-standard like into their recorded conversation.  The results indicate the following:  1) quotative like is often ambiguous due to its ability to introduce internal dialogue, external dialogue, and non-verbal gestures; 2) quotative go (as in “And she goes, ‘I don’t believe it’”) and quotative like are not synonymous, due to the latter’s ambiguity; 3) the various uses of like can be combined meaningfully in a single utterance (as seen in the following data in which we see like used in three different, yet semantically valid ways: “He like looked like he was like, ‘Oh fuck, I shouldn’ta answered the door’”; and 4) the generally accepted dichotomous nature of non-standard like (used as a quotative and focus marker) can be better viewed as a single discourse marker with two variations—focus quotative and focus marker.  The results of the study, then, indicate that non-standard like plays a semantically rich and active role in (some) English-speakers’ vocabularies.

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