The second issue of Volume 43 (autumn 2020) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to formal perspectives on morphosyntactic microvariation within the individual language user. The issue will be edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Andrew Weir.
Chomsky famously argued that ‘[l]inguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community’ (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1965:3). The focus on the monolingual stems from the insight that something as complicated as the language faculty must at the outset be studied in its purest form, and Chomsky forcefully defended this idea since ‘[t]he only way to deal with the complexities of the real world is by studying pure cases and trying to determine from them the principles that interact in the complex cases’ (quoted in Grosjean Reference Grosjean2013). In the nearly 55 years since Aspects, significant progress in formal linguistics has been made on the basis of this idealization. However, it has always been clear that it is an idealization, and the subsequent development of the Principles and Parameters model placed variation squarely at the heart of the generative program. More recently, Chomsky (Reference Chomsky2000:59) has stated that ‘everyone grows up in a multilingual environment’ and that ‘[w]hatever the language faculty is it can assume many different states in parallel’. By now the framework has advanced to the extent that more complicated cases of language competence and performance could and should receive more attention and, ideally, a formal description within the same model.
In particular, the phenomenon of intraspeaker (micro)variation raises questions which arguably go to the heart of linguistic theory. A great number of language users are bi- or multidialectal: that is, their linguistic competence encompasses two or more closely related systems which might pretheoretically be seen as ‘variants of the same language’. And the great majority of (perhaps all) language users can (consciously or not) alter their register use depending on context, a choice which can manifest in sociolinguistic variables such as the realization of phonemes and lexical choice, and also – crucially – differing morphosyntactic structures. What implications does such widespread variability – ‘universal bilingualism’ in Roeper’s (Reference Roeper1999) sense – have for the architecture of grammar?
In this special issue of NJL, we invite papers which address this issue of intraspeaker variability, focusing in particular on morphosyntactic (micro-)variation. Papers may take a theoretical or empirical focus, as long as they clearly address questions of theoretical interest, including (but not limited to): How are closely-related languages/dialects represented in individual minds? What kind of object is a ‘grammar’, and does every language user have access to ‘multiple grammars’? Is register and dialect variation within a speaker a phenomenon qualitatively different from bilingualism as classically understood?
The deadline for submitted papers is 1 November 2019. The reviewing process will take place in winter 2019 – spring 2020. All submissions should be made through NJL’s ScholarOne/Manuscript Central site https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/njl.
Prior to submission, authors are asked to consult the Journal’s Instructions for Contributors, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/information/instructions-contributors, and follow the manuscript formatting guidelines set out there.
