An introduction to variationist

sociolinguistics

Dr. Jason Grafmiller

ELAL Summer School
What do we mean by “variation”?

• People often think of language variation in terms of

regional dialects or accents
• For example…

• What do you call the item pictured here?

Example: Lexical variation in the UK

http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/
• A variety of a language is a specific incarnation of that
language as used in a particular context
• typically corresponds to salient geographical and/or social
categories
• ‘speech community’, ‘community of practice’

• Varieties can be defined along many dimensions...

• geographically
• diachronically (over time)
• demographically (age, gender, education, etc.)
• stylistically, e.g. by genre (fiction, academic, news, etc.),
medium (speech, writing, tweets, etc.) or register (formal vs.
informal)
Identity & enregisterment
All speakers exhibit variation
• Phonetic/phonological
“And when you look at your tax policies that are directed primarily at those
who are doing well, and you are neglecting people who are really strugglin’
right now, I think that is a continuation of the last eight years, and we can’t
afford Another four.” (Barack Obama,
26/09/2008)

• The
Lexical
social meaning of variation:
1) Truthfully, I was frightened; scared of being caught by the undead and
eaten
“we should alive.
note that every one of us is making many choices about self-
presentation every time we open our mouth, and in particular we add a brush-
stroke to our self-portrait every time we choose a pronunciation for the English
• gerund-participle
Morphosyntactic suffix –ing” – Mark Liberman,
2) I picked
Language Log up a paintbrush and couldn’t put it down.
3) Sluggo is Gary’s father and the brother of Herb Star
4) I'm not going to die in a nursing home, God willing. But I probably will do
something constructive until the day I die.
Variationist analysis

When people choose between different ways of saying

‘the same’ thing,...

• how often do they choose particular variants?

• in which contexts do they use particular options?
• what is the extent to which their choices have social
meaning?
• do members of different communities make different
choices in the same/different contexts?
Language variation & change (LVC) paradigm

• Founded by William Labov

• Interested in the interaction of

language, culture and society
• to what extent is variation patterned, i.e.
systematic and/or predictable?
• to what extent does variation have social
meaning?
• how can we draw on the social meaning of
language variation to explain language
change?
The linguistic variable

A variable is a set of two or more ways of saying the same thing

• (ing)
• struggling [stɹʌɡ.lɪŋ]
• strugglin’ [stɹʌɡ.lɪn]

• (agentless passive)
• They arrested Robin
• Robin was arrested

• (small freshwater crustacean)

• crayfish
• crawdad
• crawfish
• mudbug
• …
Social meaning of variants
(future time)
1) I’ll let you finish.
2) I’m going to let you finish.
3) I’m gonna let you finish.

Kanye interrupts VMAs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvaakT52RjQ
Social meaning of variants
(future time)
1) I’ll let you finish.
2) I’m going to let you finish.
3) I’m gonna let you finish.
Principle of Accountability

• A foundational principle in variationist (socio)linguistics

• Don’t just look at usage of a specific linguistic variant

that you happen to be interested in;
also examine where language users could have used
this variant but didn’t

• So, to understand the importance of a specific variant,

we also need to take account of all the other variants
with which it competes
Circumscribing the Variable Context

• According to the Principle of Accountability, it is

necessary to precisely define the context(s) in which
two or more variants are interchangeable
(a.k.a. “the envelope of variation”)

• This is necessary if we want to find out when and why

people use certain variants instead of other variants.

• Defining the envelope of variation for morphosyntactic

variables can be tricky1
Do different structures ever truly “mean ‘the same’
thing”?

1
see Lavandera (1978); Labov (1978)
Accountability & variable context: an example

Let’s say we are interested in relativization, i.e. when and why

people use the relativizer THAT instead of WHICH or ‘ZERO’

1) The dinosaur that the horn came from…

2) The dinosaur which the horn came from...
3) The dinosaur ____ the horn came from…

To define the variable context, we would say that we’re only

interested in restrictive object RCs

• non-restrictive and subject RCs don’t allow ZERO

4) The horn, which/*that/*___ belonged to a Triceratops, was
discovered by a local rancher.
5) The rancher who/that/*___ discovered the horn.
Quantitative paradigm

• Linguistic variables in a given speech community do not

vary arbitrarily, but systematically.
‘structured heterogeneity’

• Because this variation is systematic, it can be

quantitatively modelled using appropriate statistical
tools.

• Quantitative analysis involves not only investigating the

distributions (frequencies) of variants, but also
the complex set of contextual factors that
co-determine the use of one variant over the
other(s).
Classic study:
Vowel change on Martha’s Vineyard*

Martha’s Vineyard:
• a small island off New England on the eastern coast of the USA
• ~5500 permanent inhabitants (in 1960s)
• popular summer destination  ~42,000 visitors (‘summer people’)
every year
• old settlement with strong local identity

“With a 320-year history of continuous settlement, and a long record

of resistance to Boston ways and manners, the island has preserved
many archaic traits which were probably typical of southeastern NE
before 1800” Labov
(1963:278; emphasis mine)

Labov, W. (1963). “The Social motivation of a sound change.” Word 19(3):273-309.

*
Change in progress
Labov noted that by the 1960s many locals were
pronouncing certain diphthongs in ways different from
New England mainlanders

• The /ai/ and /au/ diphthongs in certain words were

becoming more ‘centralized’ among Vineyarders

knife, pride, right: [aɪ] ⇒ [ɐɪ] ⇒ [əɪ]

house, out, mouth: [aʊ] ⇒ [ɐʊ] ⇒ [əʊ]

• This was a striking reversal of a more widespread shift

in NE toward [aɪ, aʊ]
• The centralized pronunciations were in fact much older
Labov’s study

• conducted interviews with 69 native Vineyarders

• word lists
• elicited reading
• informal questions about life, values and social orientation

• calculated a ‘centralization index’ (CI) from 0 (no

centralization) to 3 (maximal centralization)

• found that variation between the standard ([aɪ, aʊ]) and

centralized diphthongs was systematic and socially
stratified
Centralization by occupation

1.00

0.75
centralization index

vowel
0.50 /ai/
/au/

0.25

0.00

fisherman farmers others

Attitude toward traditional island life

N = 40

0.6

N = 19
centralization index

0.4 vowel
/ai/
/au/

0.2

N= 6

0.0

positive neutral negative

Age-related distribution

CI /ai/ CI /au/ • Traditional economies of MV

are dying out
Over 75 0.25 0.22
• Middle aged men who elect
61 to 75 0.35 0.37 to remain on, or return to, MV
are under great economic
46 to 60 0.62 0.44
pressure
31 to 45 0.81 0.88 • Look to older fishing
community as model
14 to 30 0.37 0.46
• Most younger interviewees
hope to leave MV
CI = ‘centralization index’
higher = more centralized
Social meaning of centralization

• The meaning of this feature is “Vineyarder”

“When a man says [rait] (right) or [haus] (house), he is unconsciously
establishing the fact that he belongs to the island: that he is one of
the natives to whom the island belongs” (Labov
1963: 304)

• Chilmark fishermen as role models

• Older generations representative of traditional values and
island identity

“If someone intends to stay on the island, this model will be ever
present to his mind. If he intends to leave, he will adopt a mainland
reference group, and the influence of the old-timers will be
considerably less.”
(Labov 1963:305)
Corpus-based variationist
research
Corpora in variation studies

• most empirical variation research utilizes corpora

• Corpus-based Variationist Linguistics (CVL):

Umbrella term for quantitative analysis of linguistic
choice-making in context using naturally produced
language data

• for CVL purposes, we define a corpus as any collection

of spontaneously produced authentic language data
which can be used for the purpose of linguistic
analysis2

2
McEnery & Wilson (1996); Kennedy (2010)
“Traditional” LVC research mainly…

• focuses on how “patterns of use correlate with social

attributes such as class, sex, age[...]” (Coulmas 1998:2)
• ‘micro’-sociolinguistics
• emphasizes on vernacular speech
• relies on ethnographic fieldwork and sociolinguistic
interviews
• is concerned with phonetic variation
• focuses on changes in apparent time
• is concerned with foundational principles3

Weinrich et al. (1968); Labov (1972)

3
CVL research mainly…

• focuses on macro-sociological phenomena, e.g.

• colloquialization,
• standardization,
• dialect drift/divergence,
• prescriptivism,
• …
• examines language data from many spoken and
written registers, genres, media, etc.
• prioritizes morphosyntactic and lexical variation
• studies language change in real time
Both LVC and CVL approaches…

• focus on alternate ways of saying ‘the same’ thing

• both conduct accountable analysis of variables and variable
context(s)

• draw on data from natural usage

• sociolinguistic interviews in LVC studies constitute a kind of
corpus

• use rigorous quantitative methods to explore

constraints on variation
• examine both linguistic (‘internal’) and extra-linguistic
(‘external’) properties of the context
 Theoretical model
• CVL researchers typically work from a usage-based model of
language

“grammar
1) I picked is the
up the cognitive organization of one’s experience with
book.
language
2) I picked the[…]
bookcertain
up. facets of linguistic experience, such as frequency
of use of particular instances of constructions, have an impact on
representation[…]”
3) I picked (Bybee 2006:711)
up the book about linguistics that I borrowed from you last week.
4) I picked the book about linguistics that I borrowed from you last week up.

• Often—but not always!—CVL studies are more interested in

‘internal’ rather than social factors
• Why do the factors have the effect that they do?
• How much can/do these factors vary across language users
and communities? (interaction of socially and internally
conditioned variation)
Probabilistic grammar framework

• Variation-centered, usage- and

experience-based framework
developed by Joan Bresnan and
collaborators

• Shares LVC interest in variables

(“alternations”), insistence on
accountability & reliance on
quantitative/ probabilistic modeling.
Assumptions

1. Grammatical variation is sensitive to multiple and

sometimes conflicting constraints.
• such constraints influence linguistic choice-making in subtle
ways which may remain invisible unless analyzed
quantitatively.

2. This probabilistic knowledge is derived in large part

from language experience, and so is subtly, but
continually (re)constructed throughout speakers’ lives.
• this knowledge is reflected in many different kind of linguistic
behavior involving production and comprehension
example: English dative alternation

1) Sam gave a book to Kim. [prepositional

dative]
2) Sam gave Kim a book. [ditransitive dative]

What determines the ordering of the theme and recipient?

Many, many studies…

• Anttila et al. (2010); Bernaisch et al. (2014); Bresnan et al. (2007);
Bresnan & Ford (2010); Bresnan & Hay (2008); De Cuypere &
Verbeke (2014); Ford & Bresnan (2013); Gerwin (2013); Goldberg
(2002); Mukherjee (2005); Perek (2012); Röthlisberger et al. (to
appear); Tagliamonte (2014); Tily et al. (2009); Wolk et al. (2013),…
A dative model, based on corpus data*

*From Bresnan & Ford (2010:177)

CVL case study: Which-hunting in
American & British English
Hinrichs, Lars, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Axel Bohmann.
2015. Which-Hunting and the Standard English Relative
Clause. Language 91(4). 806–836.

Grafmiller, Jason, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Lars

Hinrichs. 2016. Restricting the restrictive relativizer:
Constraints on subject and non-subject English relative
clauses. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
(Online a.o.p.).
Relativizers in Standard English
In standard written English (StE), users have 2 or 3
options depending on the function

• Subject function
1) PatNote: Thisdog
saw the only applies
that to
bit Chris.
non-human antecedents.
2) PatOther
saw the dog which bit Chris.
options (who/whom)
are available when referring
to humans.

• Object function
3) Pat saw the dog that Chris bit.
4) Pat saw the dog which Chris bit.
5) Pat saw the dog ____ Chris bit.
 Recent changes in that vs. which

% of trigrams
% of trigrams

From https://books.google.com/ngrams
Influence of prescriptivism?
• Style guides have been proscribing use of which in restrictive RCs
since the early part of the 20th century.
Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (4th ed. 1999)
“if writers would agree to regard that
is massively as the and
popular defining relative
highly pronoun,
regarded:
& which as the non-defining,
4.6/5 there wouldonbeAmazon.com
avg. rating much gain both
within2671
lucidity & in ease.” reviews.
(Fowler 1926)
University
“The relative pronoun “which” canstudents in the
cause more USA are
trouble strongly
than any other
word, if recklessly used.recommended to buy
Foolhardy persons a copy. get lost in
sometimes
which-clauses and are never heard of again.”
(Thurber 1931)

“Careful writers [...] go which-hunting, remove the defining

[restrictive] whiches, and by so doing improve their work”

(Strunk & White 1959)

A linguist’s critique of S&W…

Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2009. “50 years of stupid grammar advice.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education 55(32). The Chronicle
Review, April 17.
• “ranges from limp platitudes to
inconsistent nonsense”
• “[the book's] enormous influence
has not improved American
students’ grasp of English
grammar; it has significantly
degraded it”
• “both authors were grammatical
incompetents”
Parallel changes in vernacular speech
Tagliamonte (2005) and D’Arcy & Tagliamonte (2010, 2015)
• Recent work on British and Canadian E suggests that WH-
variants are disappearing in colloquial speech

that is clearly the more

informal & vernacular option

which is bookish, stuffy, overly

formal
Colloquialization?

“[...] increasingly so since the 1960s and 1970s, an egalitarian and informal
communicative culture has been promoted in the public domain which
has brought the norms of writing closer to the norms of spoken usage. In
grammatical terms, this has favored the rapid disappearance of archaisms
[...], and led to a decrease in the popularity of typical markers of formal
and written style such as the passive voice. On the other hand, it has
facilitated the spread of informal grammatical options such as
contractions [...]” (Mair 2006:88)

Why is restrictive which declining?

• success of prescriptivist peeving? (‘change from above’)
• rising influence of colloquial speech norms in writing
(‘change-from-below’)
Study in a nutshell

• extracted 16,868 instances of restrictive RCs

• annotated each token for +30 contextual features

• ‘internal’: RC length, distance to antecedent, antecedent POS,…
• ‘external’ : genre, time, country
• stylistic: features reflecting how much a text adheres to
prescriptive norms

• conducted multivariate statistical analyses

• sophisticated techniques, e.g. mixed-effects regression, to
measure simultaneous effect of many factors on relativizer choice

• Conclusion: that-shift is a case of ‘institutionally backed

colloquialization’
Brown family of corpora
4 corpora of similar design sampling written StE from the
U.S. and U.K. (~1 million words each)
Defining the variable context

• Only restrictive which

1) In one of the rare interviews which Sinatra granted a

couple of years back, he intimated that[…] <LOB:E11>

2) it included a snub of the imperial family, which had

planned a welcome party.
<FROWN:A04>
• No oblique RCs with ‘pied-piping’

3) These aren’t the droids ___/that/which you’re looking for.

4) These aren’t the droids for which you’re looking.
5) *These aren’t the droids for ___ you’re looking.
6) *These aren’t the droids for that you’re looking.
Defining the variable context

• Only restrictive which

1) In one of the rare interviews which Sinatra granted a

couple of years back, he intimated that[…] <LOB:E11>

2) it included a snub of the imperial family, which had

planned a welcome party.
<FROWN:A04>
• No oblique RCs with ‘pied-piping’

3) These aren’t the droids ___/that/which you’re looking for.

4) These aren’t the droids for which you’re looking.
5) *These aren’t the droids for ___ you’re looking.
6) *These aren’t the droids for that you’re looking.
Relativizers in Brown corpora
American British

2000

Object RCs
1500

1000
Number of tokens

500

2000

Subject RCs
1500

1000

500

0
1960s 1990s 1960s 1990s

THAT WHICH ZERO

Internal factors
• Properties of antecedent and RC:
• POS, definiteness, number, length, frequency, RC length and
distance to antecedent
•  measures related to psycholinguistic processing
• Properties of the text
• Noun/verb ratio, type/token
Odds of omission
ratio, # personal pronouns, # of
subordinating conjunctionsgreater when RC and
antecedent
•  measures related to stylistic are shorte.g. formality
dimensions,

1) the one ___ they wanted

2) a couple of bangs that shook the whole damned closet

Odds of that greater

3) the best that can be said for it
when antecedent is not
4) mistakes which others manage to avoid a noun
Prescriptivism-related factors

• passive voice: % of passive constructions over active

lexical verbs in a given corpus text (The motion was
tabled)

• P-stranding: % of stranded prepositions out of all

prepositions in a given corpus text (The house which I
looked at)

• split infinitives: frequency (per 10k words) in a given

corpus text of split infinitives (to boldly go where no one
has gone before)

• shall vs. will:“the

ratio between
future modalshall
tense requires verbs will
for the and
first shall
person, will for
the second and third” (Strunk & White
1999:58)
Hypothesis

• If the that-shift is a prescriptivism-fueled change,

writers and editors who go which-hunting should also
comply with other canonical precepts (no passives, no
stranding, etc.)

• That is, we should see a correlation between

decreased use of which and decreased use of
passives, stranded Ps, split infinitives, and 1st person
will.
Statistical analysis: Hinrichs et al. 2015

Mixed-effects logistic regression analysis using R statistical

software

1. What factors determine relativizer omission?

Compare ZERO to that/which in nonsubject RCs: is the
choice of zero related at all to stylistic or prescriptivist
considerations?

2. What factors determine choice between that vs. which?

Compare that to which in subject and nonsubject RCs: to
what extent does the choice correlate with the uptake of
other precepts?
Regression model 1 (ZERO vs. that/which)
Model 1 summary

• No evidence of any statistical correlation between

choice of zero and any of the prescriptivist variables
• the droids ___ you’re looking for vs. the droids that/which
you’re looking for

Note: to
• Variation also remarkably insensitive zero is neverfactors
external
• No difference by genre or time discussed in prescriptivist
literature.
• Choice of zero instead mainly governed by processing-
related factors
• More difficult to process contexts favor overt forms
Model 2 summary (that vs. which)

• Clear effects of external factors

• Time: that favoured more in 1990s
• Country: that favoured more in US English
• Genre: fiction favours that much more so than academic and
other non-fiction prose

• Effects of processing-related factors

• more difficult to process contexts favor which

• Prescriptivism effects:
• More passives correlate with greater likelihood of which
• More stranded Ps correlate with greater likelihood of which
Model 2 summary (that vs. which)

• Clear effects of external factors

• Time: that favoured more in 1990s
• Country: that favoured more in US English
• Genre: fiction favours that much more so than academic and
other non-fiction prose

• Effects of processing-related factors

• more difficult to process contexts favor which
 Consistent with
• Prescriptivism effects: prescriptivism hypothesis
• More passives correlate with greater likelihood of which
• More stranded Ps correlate with greater likelihood of which
 Not consistent with
prescriptivism hypothesis
Study summary
• Language users make a primary choice between an
overt and a ‘deleted’ relativizer.
• This choice is constrained by language-internal factors
• Overt relativizers preferred in cognitively demanding contexts

• When using an overt form, StE writers preference for

that…
• Has increased over time
• Decreases in cognitively demanding contexts
• Correlates with two prescriptive precepts
• Is highly sensitive to stylistic considerations, e.g. formality
Interpretation

• Disentangling “adherence to prescriptivism” from other

stylistic dimensions (e.g. formal vs. informal) is quite
difficult
• interferes with our attempts to test prescriptivism as logic to
explain usage change
• interrelation of stylistic features was investigated further in a
follow up study4

• Can prescriptivism change language use?

• yes, but it needs the help of larger stylistic drifts such as
colloquialization

Grafmiller et al. (2016)

4
‘Institutionally backed colloquialization’

“[…] the increase of that in British and American StE is a case

of ‘colloquialization from above’, remarkable because
‘changes from above’, which in the customary understanding
of Labovian sociolinguistics originate ‘above’ the level of
consciousness and frequently have the benefit of overt,
positive metalinguistic discourse to propel them along, are
typically directed toward formal prestige variants. In this case,
however, the infrastructure of prestige, including the
educational system and editorial practice, are helping along a
change toward an informal variant.”
(Hinrichs et al. 2015:831; emphasis mine)
Future directions in variationist
research
To recap
Variationist (socio)linguistics…

• is interested in “alternate ways of saying ‘the same’ thing”

(Labov 1972b:188)

• utilizes collections of written texts and/or transcribed

speech as primary linguistic data

• follows the principle of accountability

• draws on rigorous quantitative methodologies to explore

the constraints on variation (language-internal or
language-external)
More accountability: How many variants?
E.g. studies of English genitives tend to focus on 2 variants:
• The s-genitive (the FBI’s director )
• The of-genitive (the director of the FBI)

But what about other options….

1) the FBI director ~ director from the FBI
2) Energy Department’s spokesman ~ Energy Department spokesman
~ ?spokesman of the Energy Department ~ spokesman for the Energy
Department ~ spokesman from the Energy department
3) restriction of federal funding ~ ?federal funding’s restriction ~ federal
funding restriction ~ restriction on federal funding
4) Leonard Cohen’s new album ~ the new album by Leonard Cohen ~ ??
the new album of Leonard Cohen ~ the new album from Leonard
Cohen ~ the new Leonard Cohen album
Combinatorial explosion
• Consider 3-way genitive variation6
• the FBI’s director ~ the director of the FBI ~ the FBI director
• 4 possible variable contexts

• But the number of contexts grows

rapidly as we add more variants …
• 4 variants = 11 contexts
• 5 variants = 26 contexts
• 6 variants = 57 contexts
• N variants = 2N – (N + 1) contexts

Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016)

6
The individual vs. the community

“LVC studies are founded on the notion of community

grammars where the individuals in the sample are believed to
be a representation of the community as a whole”
(Tagliamonte 2012:132)

• How much variability is allowed within a community?

• individuals can and do vary quite a lot7 — whose language is
really representative?
• When should we consider sets of speakers to possess
different ‘grammars’?

• How much do individuals change over their lifespans?8

• implications for apparent-time studies?

e.g. Dabrowska (2012); 8Sankoff & Blondeau (2007)

7
Toward more cognitively realistic methods

Many statistical models, e.g. regression, do not reflect

what is actually going on in people’s minds

• Memory-Based Learning: classifies items using

analogical reasoning across many observations9
• rely on surface similarities between (sets of) individual
instances of a phenomenon, i.e. exemplars

• Naive Discriminative Learning: models linguistic

variation using algorithms derived from theories of
human (and animal) learning10
• grammatical rules, constructions, etc. are implicit in the
distribution over cues

Daelemans and van den Bosch (2009); 10Baayen & Ramscar (2015)
9
One variable at time?

• feature aggregation has been a theme in the corpus-

linguistic literature for a long while (Biber 1988)

• one-variable-at-a-time methodology customary in LVC

• but there is growing interest in the joint behaviour of

multiple variables11
• What are the social and linguistic factors promote the co-
occurrence of different variants in users’ language?

e.g. Guy (2013); Oushiro (2016)

11
Further reading
References
• Baayen, R. Harald & Michael Ramscar. 2015. Abstraction, storage and Naive Discriminative Learning. In
Ewa Dabrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 100–120. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Bresnan, Joan & Marilyn Ford. 2010. Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and
Australian Varieties of English. Language 86(1). 168–213.
• Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4). 711–
733.
• Daelemans, Walter & Antal van den Bosch. 2009. Memory-Based Language Processing. Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2012. Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language
attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2(3). 219–253.
• D’Arcy, Alexandra & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2010. Prestige, accommodation, and the legacy of relative who.
Language in Society 39(03). 383–410.
• D’Arcy, Alexandra & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2015. Not always variable: Probing the vernacular grammar.
Language Variation and Change 27(03). 255–285.
• Grafmiller, Jason, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Lars Hinrichs. 2016. Restricting the restrictive relativizer.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0(0).
• Guy, Gregory R. 2013. The Cognitive Coherence of Sociolects: How Do Speakers Handle Multiple
Sociolinguistic Variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52. 63–71.
• Hinrichs, Lars, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Axel Bohmann. 2015. Which-hunting and the Standard English
relative clause. Language 91(4). 806–836.
References
• Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19(3). 273–309.
• Labov, William. 1972a. Sociolinguistic Patterns. 10th pr. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
• Labov, William. 1972b. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(01). 97–120.
• Labov, William. 1978. Where Does the Linguistic Variable Stop? A Response to Beatriz Lavandera.
Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, No. 44, 1–22. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Lab.
• Lavandera, Beatriz R. 1978. Where Does the Sociolinguistic Variable Stop? Language in Society 7(02).
171–182.
• Oushiro, Livia. 2016. Social and structural constraints in lectal cohesion. Lingua 172. 116–130.
• Sankoff, Gillian & Hélèn Blondeau. 2007. Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French.
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• Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert & Karlien Franco. 2016. Toward More
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