Introduction to special issue on morphosyntactic variation within the individual language user

Abstract

This thematic issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics focuses on morphosyntactic variation within the individual language user. The phenomenon of intraspeaker (micro)variation raises questions which arguably go to the heart of linguistic theory, especially in formal/generative perspective. Chomsky famously argued that ‘[l]inguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community’ (Chomsky 1965:3). Significant progress in formal/generative linguistics has been made on the basis of this idealization, but it has always been clear that it is an idealization. A great number of language users are bior multidialectal: that is, their linguistic competence encompasses two or more closely related systems which might pretheoretically be seen as ‘variants of the same language’. And the great majority of (perhaps all) language users can (consciously or unconsciously) alter their register use depending on context, a choice which can manifest in sociolinguistic variables such as the realization of phonemes and lexical choice, and also – crucially – differing morphosyntactic structures. Chomsky (2000:59) has stated that ‘everyone grows up in a multilingual environment’ and that ‘[w]hatever the language faculty is it can assume many different states in parallel’. Sociolinguists have of course been concerned with investigating intraspeaker variability at least since the pioneering studies of Labov (e.g. Labov 1969), but such intraspeaker optionality and variation has received somewhat less attention from linguists in the formal or generative tradition. By now, 55 years after ‘Aspects’, the generative framework has advanced to the extent that more complicated cases of language competence and performance could and should receive more attention and, ideally, a formal description within one and the same model. The papers in this volume aim to provide empirical investigations of the phenomenon, formulate relevant generalizations, and ultimately contribute to our understanding of what such a model should look like. The Scandinavian countries, and Norway in particular, are especially interesting testing grounds for the investigation of morphosyntactic variation in the individual,