Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Robert Mailhammer

One fundamental problem of any academic discipline is how to deal with variation in the data. A general approach is to find conditioning factors that enable us to predict the occurrence of a particular variant. In linguistics, the problem of variation is not just a theoretical problem, but it is also a problem for our concept of the mind. If we aren't able to account adequately for the variation - i.e. in a non-random way -in a description, how can our minds navigate between seemingly isofunctional variants and ensure successful communication? My project investigates variation in English spoken on Croker Island, Australia. In this multilingual and multidialectal environment finding conditioning factors to account for variation has proven difficult. I will show data suggesting that variants may not belong to one system but to several system, and that these variants are then recruited for other purposes.