Journal of English Linguistics

Investigations of the Canadian quotative system have to this point focused on mainland urban varieties where General Canadian English is considered to be the linguistic norm. The current analysis seeks to expand our understanding of this system by examining quotative usage among young girls in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the local vernacular differs in significant ways from the national variety. Variationist methodology is employed on a small corpus of St. John’s Youth English (SJYE), revealing notable similarities in the distribution of quotatives as well as the operation of internal constraints across the paradigm between this variety and that of the mainland. At the same time, there is evidence that be like, the most recent of the quotative cohort, has grammaticalized further in SJYE than in General Canadian, raising questions about the routes by which this change is progressing. The results thus situate SJYEwithin the Canadian quotative system while at the same time highlighting the status of Newfoundland English as a unique Canadian variety.

The corpus analysis program WordSmith Tools allows two corpora to be compared against each other in order to acquire a list of keywords: words that appear statistically more often in one text than the other. This article examines some potential problems of analyzing keywords and ways to overcome them. A keywords analysis may force the researcher to overplay differences rather than similarities, and it focuses on difference at the lexical rather than the semantic, grammatical, or pragmatic levels. An examination of dispersion patterns, concordances, and key clusters are useful supplementary forms of analysis. The use of annotated data to derive key categories or grouping like words into similar groups is also helpful.