The phenomenon of styleswitching has been important in the study of L1 and L2 languageuse. Labov's early studies correlated formal style with attention paid to speech, a notionechoed in Krashen's monitor model. Giles' accommodation theory and Bell'saudience design theory claim that speakers styleswitch in order to accommodate to the speech oftheir audience. Several SLA scholars have found evidence for accommodation in L2 speech aswell. Such correlational studies have been criticized for lacking a clear foundation in cognitivetheory. In this volume Myers-Scotton describes her Markedness Model (MM), which groundsstyleswitching (including codeswitching) in the cognitive theory of somatic markers (Damasio,1994). Because speech styles are distinguished mainly by the frequency at which certain features(such as dropping a consonant from a cluster) appear, variationists have sought to identify acognitive mechanism that could account for the apparent fine-tuning of feature frequencies.However, it is not clear from the discussion in this volume whether the somatic markerhypothesis provides such a mechanism.