We analyse genre in the speech of young people with multi-ethnic friendship groups in Paris in order to address the as yet unresolved question of whether new quotatives equivalent in meaning to English BE LIKE result from simultaneous independent parallel developments in languages other than English or from a process of calquing. We conclude that French quotative genre results from independent internal developments, but that it enters the French quotative system in the same way that BE LIKE entered the English system, driven by the meanings of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ that are shared by the lexical item genre in a range of syntactic categories. We propose that in order for a new similarity quotative to emerge, a lexical item with a meaning of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ must become syntactically multifunctional, and that the use of that lexical item must reach a critical frequency threshold. In the case of genre we suggest that the necessary increase in frequency results from the development of the lexical item into a discourse marker. We also analyse another new French quotative, ETRE LA, a sequence that we find is used to highlight activity of many kinds (including, but not confined to, spoken behaviour). The trajectory followed by each of the new quotative expressions conforms to De Smet's proposals about how linguistic innovations spread through the grammar.

中文翻译：

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新引语的起源：以巴黎法语为例

我们分析类型在巴黎多民族友谊团体的年轻人的演讲中，以解决尚未解决的问题，即与英语等效的新引文是否是英语以外的语言同时独立平行发展的结果，还是来自一个过程碾压。我们得出结论，法语引用类型源于独立的内部发展，但它进入法语引用系统的方式与 BE LIKE 进入英语系统的方式相同，由词汇项目共享的“相似性”或“近似”含义驱动类型在一系列句法类别中。我们建议，为了出现新的相似引用，具有“相似性”或“近似”含义的词项必须在句法上变得多功能，并且该词项的使用必须达到临界频率阈值。如果是类型我们认为频率的必要增加是词汇项目发展为话语标记的结果。我们还分析了另一个新的法语引语 ETRE LA，我们发现该序列用于突出多种活动（包括但不限于口语行为）。每个新的引语表达所遵循的轨迹都符合 De Smet 关于语言创新如何通过语法传播的建议。