Levels of linguistic variation in Durham

Sociolinguistic studies have shown that variation may occur on any of the accepted levels of linguistic analysis. Variation on the phonological level has been the most commonly treated in studies of English from Labov's (1966) New York study onwards. By contrast, it is rather rare that we find studies of morphological or lexical variation (the latter being the variation in the lexical form of words, for example, the Belfast alternation of /Λ/ and /Λ/ in the word foot (L. Milroy, 1980: 118)). However, morphological and lexical variation has been favoured in studies of some other languages, for instance Norwegian (Fintoft & Mjaavatn, 1980; Kerswill, 1985a), Swedish (Thelander, 1982) and Persian (Jahangiri & Hudson, 1982). On the other hand, studies of syntactic and prosodie variation have been altogether much less common (but see Cheshire, 1982; Local, 1982). In spite of differences in emphasis, the various methodologies used have all had the aim of discovering co-variation between linguistic and non-linguistic parameters.