Introduction

It may seem surprising, but linguistic variation is often seen as a ‘problem’ for linguistic theory. The models that formalist, theoretically minded linguists work with typically assume that linguistic behaviour is categorical and idealise away from the variation that is found in speech. The justification for this, following Chomsky (1965), is that much of the variation found in utterances is due to non-linguistic factors, and thus idealisation is necessary in order to see the underlying patterns behind speakers' linguistic performance. A number of strands of work in theoretical linguistics have, however, sought to take linguistic variation seriously, and they form the topic of this chapter, along with the argumentation that arises when linguistic theorists talk about (or refuse to talk about) linguistic variation.

It's no secret that languages like English are full of variation. If illustration is needed, let us consider a simple sentence like (1), which might describe a woman giving her coat to her brother.

1. (1) Betty took off her coat and gave him it.

If we limit ourselves to syntactic and phonological variation (as I do throughout this chapter), we could imagine a number of ways in which speakers of English might utter (1), or something very close. As a speaker of English born and raised in the English East Midlands, I could easily utter (1), but I could also utter (2).