Source: After Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004: 502.
Popular ideologies correlating the use of like with juvenile inarticulacy are based on the mistaken assumption that it is a haphazard, random insertion, or meaningless filler (D’Arcy 2007: 386). When these ideologies are confronted with the facts of actual usage, a more complex picture emerges: like is predominantly associated neither with syntactic planning difficulties nor with lexical indecision (D’Arcy 2005), but appears to play a role in indicating textual relations between sequentially dependent units of dis- course (Schiffrin 1987), as well as marking focus, or the speaker’s epistemic stance towards an utterance (D’Arcy 2008: 130).
Ground-breaking research conducted on the occurrence of like in Canadian English (D’Arcy 2005) indicates that despite its evident positional mobility, its distribution is subject to systematic syntactic constraints. It has also been demonstrated that while younger speakers are in the vanguard with respect to frequency of use, discourse like is by no means confined to the younger generation, and is encountered in the vernacular of older speakers, albeit at different rates. Crucially, D’Arcy (2005) establishes that there are systematic, incremental modifications in the use of like across successive generations, indicating that it is a change in progress rather than an age-graded feature exclusively propagated by the adolescent sub-section of the population.