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Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy
Edited by Naomi Shin and Daniel Erker
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 76] 2018
► pp. 45–66

Variable grammars

Competence as a statistical abstraction from performance. Constructing theories from data

| New York University

Linguists generally postulate a mental grammar which children infer from the speech they encounter, and then use to generate their own speech productions. This grammar is often assumed to be invariant and categorical. Language in use, however, is massively variable: the child encounters diversity at the level of dialect, sociolect, and idiolect. Furthermore, all units of language have multiple realizations and fuzzy boundaries. This raises a fundamental question: if the data is variable, even continuous, how does the child arrive at a grammar that is categorical and discrete? I argue that the system that a learner infers is not invariant and discrete, but rather one that recognizes, incorporates, manipulates, and generates variability.

Keywords: child language acquisition, variable grammar, variable rules, variationist sociolinguistics, linguistic variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variation in linguistic theory
  • 3.Probabilistic competence
  • 4.The fuzzy lexicon
    • 4.1Lexical frequency
    • 4.2Lexical exceptions
  • 5.Acquisition
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.04guy
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