The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

282 Sylvie Dubois and David Sankoff
15 The Variationist Approach
toward Discourse Structural
Effects and Sociointeractional
Dynamics
SYLVIE DUBOIS AND DAVID SANKOFF
0 Introduction
Sociolinguists tend to focus on spontaneous speech used in ordinary conversational
situations. The variationist approach to sociolinguistics involves open-ended procedures
to obtain representative and comparable data, which contrasts with principles
of control and predictability in other experimental-evaluative approaches (see
Sankoff 1989 for more details). The variationist method relies on quantitative analysis
to validate interpretations of the data. The purpose of the quantitative method is to
highlight the sociocultural meaning of linguistic variation and the nature of the relationships
among the linguistic aspects in probabilistic terms. The use of quantitative
analysis is not a minor methodological detail. It provides a more accurate understanding
of the usage and the frequency of the forms within the community as well as a
way of detecting linguistic change. The frequency of forms and speakers’ preferences
give a more realistic overview of the usage of linguistic structures. More importantly,
statistical tools allow us to pinpoint the social and linguistic conditioning as well as
the tendencies and regularities within the linguistic system. Being a more objective
and accurate basis of analysis than intuitions and judgments of value, the quantitative
method is a powerful and efficient tool.
Sociolinguists view discourse as the product of a specific verbal interaction resulting
from a set of choices vis-à-vis the set of all the potential choices within a language.
Discursive competence implies the knowledge of linguistic forms, the context within
which they might be used, and the sociolinguistic circumstances which permit them
to be realized; these circumstances include the conceptual universe of the speakers,
their sociocultural characteristics, and the interactional strategies between speakers.
Several analysts (Labov 1978; Lavandera 1978; Dines 1980; Romaine 1981; Thibault
1982; Weiner and Labov 1983; Vincent 1983, 1986; Horvath 1985; Dubois 1992) have
identified five characteristics of variation analysis within discourse. First, discourse