ABSTRACT
This chapter presents varying theories of language acquisition in terms of variationist and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) accounts in order to provide a theoretical overview for the quantitative results. Traditionally, variationists have studied how language structures vary systematically at various levels of linguistic organization. More variationist-oriented approaches to SLA have provided different ways of generalizing the nature of interlanguage variability by proposing factors that tend to be linked either to the linguistic system itself or to the speakers' social situation. While SLA research has typically considered interlanguage variation in terms of a categorical, intuited choice between two forms, sociolinguists are poised to provide rigorous descriptions of the principled nature of the variation between these forms. D. R. Preston isolates one important misunderstanding in the conversation between SLA and sociolinguistics: namely, the former field reduces the concerns of the latter to what might be called "socially sensitive pragmatics".
