In:Free Variation in Grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches
Edited by Kristin Kopf and Thilo Weber
[Studies in Language Companion Series 234] 2023
► pp. 1–20
Get fulltext
Chapter 1Free variation, unexplained variation?
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 31 October 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234.01web
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234.01web
Article outline
- On the history of ‘free variation’
- Free variation: Fact or fiction?
- Investigating free variation
- This volume
- Identifying and measuring free variation
- Free variation and language change
- Free variation? Look harder!
Acknowledgements Notes References
References (47)
Adger, David & Trousdale, Graeme. 2007. Variation in English syntax: theoretical implications. English Language & Linguistics 11(2): 261–278.
Anttila, Arto. 2002. Variation and phonological theory. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), 206–243. Malden (MA), Oxford: Blackwell.
Campe, Petra. 1999. Der adnominale Genitiv im heutigen Deutsch. Versuch einer kognitiv-linguistischen Analyse des reinen Kasus im Vergleich zu alternativen Konstruktionen. Dissertation. Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Cappelle, Bert. 2009. Can we factor out free choice? In Describing and Modeling Variation in Grammar [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 204], Guido Seiler, Andreas Dufter & Jürg Fleischer (eds), 183–202. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Cornips, Leonie E. A. & Corrigan, Karen P. (eds). 2005. Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social [Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science Series 4, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 265]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach [Longman Linguistics Library]. Harlow, New York: Longman.
Dammel, Antje & Schallert, Oliver (eds). 2019. Morphological Variation. Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Vol. 207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
De Cock, Barbara. 2020. Intersubjective Impersonals in Context: A Multivariate Analysis of Spanish Uno and Se in Spoken Language. Catalan Journal of Linguistics (Special Issue): 93–114.
De Smet, Isabeau & Van de Velde, Freek. 2020. Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 31(3): 393–416.
Dufter, Andreas, Fleischer, Jürg & Seiler, Guido (eds). 2009. Describing and Modeling Variation in Grammar (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ellis, Rod. 1999. Item versus system learning: explaining free variation. Applied Linguistics 20(4): 460–480.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure [Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Language universals: with special reference to feature hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton.
Gries, Stefan T. 2003. Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study of Particle Placement [Open Linguistics Series]. London: Continuum.
Hinrichs, Lars & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2007. Recent changes in the function and frequency of Standard English genitive constructions: a multivariate analysis of tagged corpora. English Language and Linguistics 11(3): 437–474.
Hubbell, Allan F. 1950. The Pronunciation of English in New York City. Consonants and Vowels. New York: King’s Crown Press, Columbia University.
Joos, Martin. 1968[1959]. The isolation of styles. In Readings in the Sociology of Language, Joshua A. Fishman (ed), 185–191. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Kager, René. 1999. Optimality Theory [Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kortmann, Bernd. 2010. Areal variation in syntax. In Language and Space: an international handbook of linguistic variation. Vol.1: Theories and methods [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschat 30.1], Peter Auer & Jürgen E. Schmidt (eds), 837–864. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1: 199–244.
. 1994. Morphosyntactic variation. In Papers from the 30th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Vol. 2: The parasession on variation in linguistic theory, Katherine Beals (ed), 180–201. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
. 2001. Syntactic change. In The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory [Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics], Mark Baltin & Chris Collins (eds), 699–729. Malden (MA), New York: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 1966a. The social stratification of English in New York. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns [Conduct and Communications Series]. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
Lightfoot, David. 1999. The Development of Language. Acquisition, Change, and Evolution [Blackwell/Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition]. Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2019. Unnatural bedfellows? The sociolinguistic analysis of variation and language documentation. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 49(2): 229–241.
Müller, Gereon. 2003. Optionality in optimality-theoretic syntax. In The Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book [Studies in Generative Grammar 61], Lisa Cheng & Rint Sybesma (eds), 289–321. Berlin: Mouton.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1983. Grammatical Theory. Its Limits and Its Possiblilities. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.
Nowak, Jessica. 2011. Zur Herausbildung semantischer Differenzierungen bei Konjugationsdubletten. Jahrbuch für Germanistische Sprachgeschichte 2(1): 312–325.
Preston, Dennis R. 1996. Variationist Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. In Second language acquisition and linguistic variation [Studies in Bilingualism (SiBil)], Dennis R. Preston & Robert Bayley (eds), 1–45. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Röthlisberger, Melanie. 2018. Regional variation in probabilistic grammars: A multifactorial study of the English dative alternation. Dissertation. [URL]
Seiler, Guido. 2004. On three types of dialect variation and their implications for linguistic theory. Evidence from verb clusters in Swiss German dialects. In Dialectology meets Typology: Dialect Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 153], Bernd Kortmann (ed), 367–399. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4): 193–229.
Sonderegger, Stefan. 1979. Grundzüge deutscher Sprachgeschichte. Vol. 1: Einführung – Genealogie – Konstanten. Diachronie des Sprachsystems. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Sutter, Gerd. 2009. Towards a multivariate model of grammar: The case of word order variation in Dutch clause final verb clusters. In Describing and Modeling Variation in Grammar [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 204], Andreas, Dufter, Jürg Fleischer & Guido Seiler (eds), 225–254. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Rosenbach, Anette, Bresnan, Joan & Wolk, Christoph. 2014. Culturally conditioned language change? A multivariate analysis of genitive constructions in ARCHER. In Late Modern English Syntax, Marianne Hundt (ed), 133–152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. 1969[1939]. Principles of Phonology. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Uhrig, Peter. 2015. Why the Principle of No Synonymy is Overrated. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63(3): 323–337.
Werth, Alexander, Bülow, Lars, Pfenninger, Simone & Schiegg, Markus (eds). 2021. Intra-individual Variation in Language [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 363]. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Zwart, C. Jan-Wouter. 1996. Verb clusters in continental West Germanic dialects. In Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 139], James R. Black & Virginia Motapanyane (eds), 229–258. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
