Variationist Approaches

Abstract

Variationist approaches began with William Labov’s work on native speakers and were later applied to the study of additional-language learners. Variationist approaches enable researchers to consider grammatical and sociolinguistic competences simultaneously and, consequently, to make observations about how the linguistic and social components of an additional language develop. This chapter addresses three of the overarching topics and issues that pertain to variationist Second Language Acquisition (SLA), all of which are germane to the field of SLA more generally: the developmental trajectory, targetlikeness, and individual variation. Scholars have collected various types of data in order to investigate additional-language variation. Variationist research involving corpora typically entails extensive coding, as researchers must not only identify the variable context and all occurrences of the variants of a linguistic variable but also code for a host of independent variables. For one, variationist approaches have concentrated on morphosyntactic and phonological phenomena, rather than lexical ones.