Abstract
The collocation I feel like has attracted American media attention for reportedly being newly ubiquitous (Baker 2013, Smith 2015, Worthen 2016). While I have proposed that it is becoming an epistemic marker in North American dialects of English (Brook 2011: 65), I have made this prediction of (it) feels like as well. The present study artificially restricts the conventional envelope of variation to evaluate what distinguishes these two phrases in vernacular Canadian English. I feel like is the more frequent by far, but (it) feels like shows a specialization for metaphorical subordinate clauses rather than concrete ones. I interpret this as a case of persistence (Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009). Before the arrival of the like complementizer, the only predecessors to ’(it) feels like were (it) feels as if and (it) feels as though, and both as if and as though have a preference for metaphoricality (Brook 2014). I feel like was also preceded by options with ’as if and as though, but counterbalanced with that and Ø, which prefer concrete subordinate clauses (Brook 2014). The results attest to the value to be found in (cautiously) conducting a microscopic study of a corner of the envelope of variation.
Acknowledgments
For valuable discussions and feedback, I would like to thank Sali A. Tagliamonte, Alexandra D’Arcy, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Aaron Dinkin, Derek Denis, Lisa Schlegl, Ron Smyth, Ruth Maddeaux, Laurel MacKenzie, two anonymous reviewers, and my audience at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46 (University of Wisconsin, Madison, November 2–5, 2017). I am also grateful to the research assistants of the Language Variation and Change Laboratory at the University of Toronto. Any errors that remain are mine alone. Parts of this work appeared in somewhat different form in Brook (2016) and in my interview with Baker (2015).
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