There comes a time when the analyses must stop. The marginal data has been honed to perfection. The multivariate analyses have been run enough. The results are as they are. Now it is time to pause and reflect, to interpret them.

The essential task is to understand and explain the nature of variability in a data set. What constrains it? What underlying mechanism produced it? What grammatical work is the variable doing in the grammar? If two (or more) data sets are being compared, do they share an underlying grammar? To what extent is their grammar shared and, if only to a certain extent, how far? Is the variable stable or is it implicated in linguistic change? Can the path of its linguistic development be traced through the variable grammar? Is it an innovation, a re-analysis or a retention?

By the time you have reached this point, and if you have completed each of the exercises in this book, most of the work is already done. You have articulated the issues and posed the questions. You have collected the data, constructed the corpus, discovered the variable, and circumscribed, extracted and coded it. You have gone through the many-layered procedures of analysis, re-analysis, honing and refining. You know your data inside out, every cross-tabulated cell of it.