You could so easily od like: Clause final and other pragmatic functions of like in Liverpool English speech

Pragmatic or discourse like is one of the most prominent features in everyday vernacular englishes (d'arcy, 2005, p. 2). overtly stigmatised, the discourse marker like is considered by many to be a superfluous feature that is a sign of hesitancy and inarticulacy and has given rise to many criticisms of such usage with those using like being thought of as stupid. in this study, i investigate the use of like among younger (16-25) males and females and older (50-65) males from liverpool. conversations between the three age cohorts and genders were recorded for the purpose of analyses. to ensure that the frequency of scores are comparable across texts, i adopt biber, conrad and reppen's (1998) methodology of normalisation and give frequency scores per 1000 words of text. the study found that like is not a feature of inarticulacy, and that it's not used to gain time in conversation. it is used more by female speakers for certain pragmatic functions such as focus, metaphoric usage and narration. between the genders males were found to use clause final like the most, which could be seen as a regional dialect feature.