Now that you are attuned to how people start their sentences, now pay close attention to how they end their sentences. Instead of the nice, neat packages that we see in books, e.g. Sali is a sociolinguist, when people talk they inevitably end their sentences with a embellishment of some sort, like a linguistic TA DAH, e.g. Sali is a sociolinguist, you know or Sali is a sociolinguist, right? or Sali is a sociolinguist or something like that. Teenagers end their sentences in a lot of different ways, as in (118).

1. a. I do feel guilty once in awhile you know. (Craig Cavalheiro, 19)

2. b. I was like eight or nine right? (Tina Mancini, 11)

3. c. They're like, really quiet and like whatever. (Clara Felipe, 16)

4. d. Oh all these silly things, well you just- you live with them so. (Rachel Patry, 63)

5. e. They're going to be just manufacturing DVDs and all that shit. (Carl Balders, 24)

6. f. Yeah and aren't you like super smart or something? (Eleanor Colum, 14)

7. g. See, but we wouldn't go into smoking or anything. (Catherine Hui, 19)

8. h. His sister's like a rebel and has piercings everywhere and goes out and all that stuff. (Julie Wang, 14)

9. i. They don't really let you do that now, well with the double-cohort and what not. (Charles Lee, 15)

The question is, how do the sentence enders (SEs) that teenagers use compare to the rest of the community? Did the individuals in (118) just make up these forms willy-nilly? Is this proliferation of SEs a hallmark of decay in the language? First, let's find out what people actually use.

This study was conducted with my student Derek Denis. We extracted all the SEs from 87 individuals from the TEC/TTC who were strategically selected to provide a balanced sample by age and sex, providing 2,200 tokens (Tagliamonte and Denis, 2010). Figure 7.1 shows the frequency of the main SEs in each age cohort.

Certain SEs are strongly associated with one generation or another. For example, you know, as in (119a), is by far the most frequent form among the individuals born between 1910 and 1940. A notable characteristic among those born in the 1960s is the use of right, as in (119b).