Examining the interaction between grammatical and sociolinguistic conditioning: the case of the (ING) variable

Abstract

While the (ING) variable has been studied extensively within the context of both sociolinguistic conditioning and grammatical conditioning, no study to date has examined the interaction between these two types of conditioning. To this end, the present study collected 300 tokens of the (ING) variable from recordings of spoken English from the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English, which were then analysed for sociolinguistic conditioning, grammatical conditioning, and the interaction between the two. Results showed that there might be evidence for interaction between the grammatical conditioning of (ING) variation and the sociolinguistic factors gender, age, and hometown & home state. However, the present study is not conclusive due to the limited scope and the reliance on a small data set. Nonetheless, it has revealed potentially interesting paths that future studies could take up.