Title: Quotative ‘Be Like’
(joint work with Andreas Stokke (Uppsala))
Abstract:  There are a variety of familiar ways of talking about our mental states and speech acts, such as direct discourse (as in, ‘Ellen said, “I’m leaving now!”’), indirect discourse (as in, ‘Ellen thought that she would leave’). DD and ID continue to raise difficult philosophical and linguistic issues; but if they are still not fully understood, that is not for lack of trying: there are thousands of philosophical papers about belief and belief ascription, and hundreds or thousands about other attitudes: desire, knowledge, thinking, and so on.  By contrast, one common way we characterise our own mental states and speech acts has entirely escaped philosophical attention: quotative ‘be like’ or QBL (as in, ‘Ellen was like “I’m leaving now!”’). We argue that neglect of QBL has resulted in a significant gap in our understanding of our own minds and our ways of talking about them.  QBL is interesting because it is very common — corpus studies reveal that it is more common than ‘says’ or ‘thinks’ in many dialects of English, and related constructions are common in other languages as well — and because (as we show) QBL functions very differently to DD and ID, and in particular is not reducible to ’says’ or ’thinks’ ascriptions.  Showing that QBL is distinctive in this respect is the first aim of this paper; a second aim is to map out some of the space of theoretical options for explaining QBL.