Inherent variability and Minimalism: Comments on Adger's ‘Combinatorial variability’

Abstract

Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation betweenwasandwereafteryouandwein the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two ‘routes’ towe/you was, but only one towe/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemesyouandwerather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism.