ABSTRACT
Discourse is the crucial site of language change, since it is here that speakers must negotiate meaning. Speech style represents the model acquired, before the standardising in uence of elitism and/or education becomes an overlay on usage and systematically eradicates the regularity of the constraints on language variation, and language change. Sociolinguistic variables are the formal representations of heterogeneity, reflecting the set of delimitable options for the realisation of some linguistic meaning or function. Where grammaticalisation has firmly caught the attention of variationists, fewer have explicitly paid heed to lexicalisation. It is possible that the trajectory is not one of grammaticalisation, but rather of lexicalisation: an optional grammatical form has come to function in tandem with a lexical form, with meaning, patterns of use, and constraints on use that are distinct from those of its source composites.
