ABSTRACT
Concept developed by Labov (1969) and Cedergren and Sankoff (1974) to describe linguistic variation using statistical methods. A speaker’s choice between (at least) two linguistic (phonological, morphological, syntactic) alternatives and their dependency on linguistic and extralinguistic environmental conditions (phonological or syntactic context, discourse function of an utterance, situative context of a conversation, identity of the speaker with a particular social group, and so on) can be calculated using individual statistical models as an indication of the proba ility of use of a particular variable rule.
