The changing demands of language use : communicative social cognition in the interpretation of quotative ‘be like’

This thesis investigates the changing cognitive demands of language use through a sustained investigation of quotative be like. Quotative be like uses like to quote, as in “I was like, ‘that’s so weird!’”. It is unusually flexible and is frequently used to report both thought and speech. It is also extremely popular and has quickly become the preferred way to report thought and speech in English. Because quotative be like is frequently used for both thought and speech report, it is non-specific in a way that typical thought verbs (think) and utterance verbs (say) rarely are. The thesis investigates whether this non-specificity means that QBL users need to deploy sociocognitive processing in ways that they would not need to otherwise, to monitor the pragmatic context for information that can support interpretation. I develop a theoretical account that outlines how children’s pragmatic development can be a key contributor to their mentalizing development, arguing first that experience with mental state discourse is an important stimulus for mentalizing development, and second that experience with mentalistic discourse is partially conditional on an ability to pragmatically infer thought meanings. This means that changes to mentalistic discourse, such as QBL, can have important ramifications for cognitive development. In a novel interpretation task, I find that both children and adults integrate sociocognitive information about goals and norms to interpret quotative be like. This means that quotative be like raises specific socio-cognitive processing demands, separate to any general demands of Gricean communication. I also find that both children and adults find it much more challenging to infer thought meanings in QBL – even if they are at baseline about equally likely to infer either meaning. These findings position quotative be like as a central topic in the emerging cultural evolutionary pragmatics research program.