Variation in agreement: A lexical feature-based approach

• Published in: Lingua Vol. 120; no. 5; pp. 1109 - 1134
• Main Authors: Adger, David, Smith, Jennifer
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.05.2010; Elsevier
• Subjects: Agreement; Buckie; Descriptive studies and applied theories; Features; Linguistics; Syntax; Underspecification; Variation; Buckie; Agreement; Features; Variation; Underspecification; Linguistic variation; Sociolinguistics; Generative syntax; Variability; Grammatical agreement; English; Dialect; Functional category
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.05.007

This paper has two main theoretical aims: (i) to argue for the utility of a lexical, feature-based, approach to intra-dialectal and inter-dialectal language variation, confirming and extending Borer’s (1984:251–254) suggestion that language variation is ultimately a matter of the properties of the lexicon of functional categories; (ii) to argue that the variability found in an individual speaker is two-dimensional: it may involve varying featural specification of functional categories and/or underspecification in the mapping between these categories and morphological forms, the former modeling the kind of variation usually thought of as ‘parametric’ and the latter modeling the kind of variation usually captured by the notion of linguistic variable (Labov, 1994, 2000). We thus offer a unified model of the grammatical representations that underlie language variation of both types.