The linguistic variable and syntactic variation in creole continua

Abstract

One of the achievements of sociolinguistic research has been to show that fluctuation in language use which had traditionally been referred to as free variation was in fact not free at all, but correlated with a variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The analytical device proposed by Labov (1966) as a means of investigating such conditioned variation is the linguistic variable, a linguistic unit consisting of two or more variants which co-vary with other linguistic as well as extra-linguistic variables. Labov conceived of the variants of a variable as socially and stylistically different alternative but linguistically equivalent ways of ‘saying the same thing’. Labov’s early work applied the concept of the variable to phonological data alone, but the concept was soon extended to the morphological and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. l