At the invitation of the School of Foreign Languages, Dr. StephenLevey, sociolinguist from the University of Ottawa gave a lectureon Acquiring Variation and Change in the English Quotative Systemon March 29.
The be like variant has diffused aggressively throughout varietiesof English over the last three decades. Dr. Levey’s investigationtracks children’s acquisition of the be like variant, drawing on anumber of data sources from Eastern London and with a view toproviding insights into the acquisition of discourse-pragmaticchange. In his lecture, Dr. Levey gave an in-depth explanation onthe research process, including topic selection, methods insociolinguistics, and results.
Dr. Stephen Levey is a renowned Canadian sociolinguist and DoctoralSupervisor in Linguistics in the University of Ottawa. His researchtopics include variations and changes in Canadian English,variations and changes in English in London, children’s acquisitionof grammatical variations. His research results have been publishedin top international journals such as Language Variation &Change and Journal of English Linguistics.