Free variation, unexplained variation?
Thilo Weber, Kristin Kopf · Studies in language companion series · 2023
As Labov (e.g.1972: 188) notes, "[i]t is common for a language to have many alternate ways of saying 'the same' thing".Such alternants can be found at the level of pronunciation (e.g.working vs workin'), they occur in lexis (car vs automobile), and they exist in morphology and syntax (Who is he talking to? vs To whom is he talking?)(all examples from Labov).Over the last two decades, grammaticalin particular, syntactic -variation has been investigated in numerous studies (see e.g. the contributions in Cornips & Corrigan 2005; Dufter et al. 2009; Dammel & Schallert 2019; Werth et al. 2021), with linguists such as Adger & Trousdale (2007: 274) or Kortmann (2010: 841) going so far as to call variation the 'core explanandum' of grammatical theory.The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained, or whether there remains a certain amount of unpredictable -or 'free' -variation, and the question of what implications the (non-)existence of this type of variation would hold for the empirical study and our theoretical models of grammar.Linguistic variation may occur across different speakers ('inter-individual variation') as well as within an individual speaker ('intra-individual variation') (see Werth et al. 2021).Traditionally, the factors impacting variation have been separated into 'internal' and 'external' ones.Typical examples of 'external' factors include style/register, the speaker's regional or social background and the planning conditions under which an utterance takes place.Internal factors, on the other hand, may include the phonological context, length or complexity of the structure under investigation, the animacy of its referent and many others.The present volume deals with the question of whether all variation can, at least in principle, be explained with reference to such internal or external factors.It does so on the basis of empirically well-grounded case studies from a wide range of languages and language varieties.