# Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/3, 2003: 365±377 Use of the discourse marker like in interviews 1 Janet M. Fuller Southern Illinois University, U.S.A. This Note examines colloquial uses of like as a discourse marker with the goal of specifying its discourse functions, including semantic, pragmatic, and socio- pragmatic aspects of meaning. The data presented here come from nine interviews (Speakers 1±9), conducted by two female interviewers (A and B). The analysis examines the use of like by both interviewers and interviewees, and examines the eect of dierent speakers' roles and conversational goals on the use of like in these data. The use of like by the interviewers is examined across interviews to determine what factors give rise to variation in rates of like use in dierent interviews. The interactional factor which will be the focus of this analysis is the factor of speaker role, speci®cally, the roles enacted by the interviewers in interviews with nine dierent speakers. Unsurprisingly, the role of interviewer is played out in dierent ways in dierent interviews. Schirin (1996) describes the negotia- tion and construction of roles as a collaborative process: . . . roles are not viewed as properties of individuals alone: our roles and statuses are bound together by sets of reciprocal expectations and obligations about what to do, and by sets of reciprocal expectations and obligations about what to do, and about how and when to do it . . . Put dierently, who we are is sustained by our ongoing interactions with others, and the way we position ourselves in relation to those others. (Schirin 1996: 196±197) In these data, the interviewer enacted her role dierently in interactions in which the interviewee made only brief responses compared with interviews in which the interviewee spoke more freely. These dierences are apparent in rates of like usage in these data. DATA AND METHODOLOGY The data for this study were collected as part of a larger project examining the use of discourse markers (DMs) in two speech contexts (an interview and a naturally occurring conversation) by both native and non-native speakers of English. The data involved in the current analysis are tape-recordings of nine