Listeners' sensitivity to the frequency of sociolinguistic variables

Abstract

Introduction Over the past 40 years, studies of linguistic variation have produced a great deal of data on the regular social and stylistic stratification of sociolinguistic variables. Finegrained differences have been observed and replicated in the production of stable sociolinguistic variables like (ING), (DH), or Spanish (S), with significant differences between four or five social levels and four or five stylistic levels (Labov 1966, Trudgill 1974, Cedergren 1973, Weinberg 1974). Figure 1 is a typical product of such studies: the graphic representation of a cross-tabulation of the social and stylistic stratification of (ING) in NYC. The vertical axis is the frequency of the non-standard apical variant in the