ABSTRACT
The methodological difficulties may be a contributing factor to the asymmetry in variationist studies. A combination of methodological techniques is used to address this problem. Synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of variation and change in agreement with collective nouns which require methodological techniques appropriate to each. A sociolinguistic study, comprising guided interviews coupled with a cloze test, forms the basis of the synchronic component of the investigation. This combination of techniques is particularly useful, as it allows results which differ in a number of respects from the same speaker to be compared: written versus spoken medium; informal versus formal context; spontaneous versus non-spontaneous production. Combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and a number of different methodological techniques, addresses one of the key challenges with the study of morphosyntactic variation, which is the possibility of obtaining enough data for quantitative analysis.
