The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al.2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the Constant Rate Effect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like, but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S-curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like, the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

中文翻译：

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像和恒率效应：从S曲线的底部到顶部

这像引语在英语世界中迅速出现，并迅速渗透到多个国家年轻演讲者的引语系统中。我们学习像（及其协变量）在两个社区——加拿大多伦多和英国约克——在表观时间和两个不同的实时点。我们追踪表观时间轨迹像及其从开始到饱和的协变量。我们利用数据集的巨大规模来检查影响引用变异的语言因素的未充分研究方面。基于早期的建议（Cukor-Avila 2002；Durham等。2012)像可能随着时间的推移显示出与 C 一致的图案即时R吃乙效果（或 CRE，Kroch 1989），我们认为 CRE 确实适用于像，但需要小心处理。逻辑建模假设顶部小号-curve 位于给定变量上下文的 100% 处。如果是像，饱和点接近 75-85%，小变体在系统中保留了小的语义立足点。结合我们的分析，我们建议如何使 CRE 的预测适应可能导致饱和但不分类使用的变化。