Modelling Socio-grammatical Variation

Abstract

Studies providing evidence of social stratification for phonological variables in Toronto English raise the question as to whether grammatical variables are similarly stratified. Examining variation in there-existentials with plural reference, I investigate the role of ethnicity in conditioning the variation and consider appropriate methods for modelling socio-grammatical variation. A dataset of 1,252 tokens extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 78 speakers of three ethnic backgrounds was coded for social and linguistic factors. The choice of recursive partitioning for multivariate analysis is motivated by the small numbers and overlap between factors. Linguistic and social factors are interwoven in conditioning the variation, but ethnicity exerts significant effects, which can be attributed to second-language learning (in the first generation) and to the desire to construct and express ethnic differences in language (for younger speakers). Expanding the toolbox of variationist sociolinguistic analysis beyond traditional statistical methods helps to clarify issues raised by grammatical variation.