Variation in Linguistic Systems

"Students---undergraduate and graduate---love this book. As a teacher, I do too It tills a huge gap in the field, Walker explains with clarity how to undertake a study of linguistic variation and provides the only serious guide showing readers how their descriptive results inform and advance our understanding of variation as part of a lingustic system. Drawing on a refreshing range of languages for its data sets, this book enthuses readers with the small triumphs of discovery and the statisfaction of making a contribution to the social science of language."---Miriam Meyerhoff, University of Auckland

"A new and exciling contribution to the field."---Sall Tagllamonte, University of Toronto

Tying together work on a number of languages and linguistic varieties in different locales, this book provides students and researchers with a convenient, unified overview of variationist analysis in linguistics. Variation in Linguistic Systems takes a theoretical and quantitative approach to the study of variation in language, focusing on the role of language-internal constraints on variation and the relation of linguistic variation to linguistic theory. It introduces the basic concepts of variationist linguistics and includes key discussions on language change, language contact, the different types of variation, multivariate analysis with GoldVarb, and variation in sound and grammatical systems.

Here is an ideal textbook for an introductory course on variation, as well as a useful resource for scholars with some background in linguistics who are interested in the study of language variation and its relation to the wider field of linguistics.