The social meaning of syntax

The study of syntactic variation has lagged behind the study of phonological variation in sociolinguistics, despite early claims that ‘[t]he extension of probabilistic considerations from phonology to syntax is not a conceptually difficult jump’ (Sankoff 1973: 58).1 Documented challenges to the study of syntactic variation include the increased difficulty in circumscribing a linguistic variable when dealing with levels of the grammar above phonology (Tagliamonte 2012: 206–7), and problems of convincingly quantifying syntactic variables which occur less frequently than phonological variables (Rickford et al. 1995: 106). Added to this, it has been argued that syntactic variables are less subject to social evaluation than phonological variables (Labov 1993, 2001: 28; Levon & Buchstaller 2015) and, even when they are, they tend to have ‘quite fixed social meanings associated with external facts like class and particularly education’ (Eckert 2018: 190).