The Linguistic Variables

The document discusses linguistic variables in language and different methods for analyzing them. It defines linguistic variables as elements of language like words or pronunciations that can vary in form while maintaining the same social meaning. It provides examples of variables in pronunciation and syntax from different dialects of English. It also discusses challenges in analyzing phonological variables and methods proposed by researchers like Labov and Trudgil for studying variants on single or multiple dimensions. It proposes a scoring method to compare texts based on frequencies of variables but notes shortcomings in not capturing the distribution or relative contribution of individual variants.