Social stereotypes,personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K.1

This article investigates the attitudes of British respondents towards the quotatives be like and go. The results of a matched guise test and a social attitudes survey are presented and compared with the findings of studies on be like and go‐perception in the U.S. It is found that the perceptual load of the two quotatives on both sides of the Atlantic is similar in some respects and different in others. This effectively means that, in cases of borrowing, the stereotypes attached to linguistic items are not simply taken over along with the surface item. Rather, the adoption of global resources is a more agentive process, whereby attitudes are re‐evaluated and re‐created by speakers of the borrowing variety. It is suggested that attitudinal information presents an important backdrop to distributional studies in cases of global language trends.