The articles in this issue were developed from presentations in the Intersections workshop held concurrently with NWAV44. The goals of that workshop were to widen and deepen the study of linguistic variation by creating intersections with other approaches to linguistic analysis.

Typically, a study of variation starts from the known and works its way into the unknown. But what happens when you are analyzing variation at the same time as you are grappling with the fundamental structure of the language? Whereas variationist methods often involve doing strategic violence to the data, isolating single variables, documentation tends to encourage a broader perspective. This article shows how documentation of Nkep (Central Eastern Oceanic, Vanuatu) has progressed when guided by a focus on internal and social variation. Three variables are discussed (the near merger of two front vowels, lexical borrowing, and the expression of subject agreement) to highlight the rewards and challenges associated with drawing together two subdisciplines (variation and documentation) that have not traditionally had much to say to each other. Analyzing variation alongside documentation encourages us to write ‘symphonies of variation’, as opposed to ‘sonatas’ of individual variables.

We argue that an evaluation of morphosyntactic convergence between Picard and French must consider multiple variables, comparing rates of (co-)occurrence of Picard-like and French-like variants and linguistic constraints across the two varieties. Contemporary oral data from interviews with Picard–French bilinguals and French monolinguals were analyzed and contrasted with older Picard data. While future temporal reference in Picard and in French appear similar based on frequency, linguistic conditioning reveals differences across varieties and over time. Auxiliary selection displays clearer Picard–French distinctions, especially when considering the effect of linguistic factors. The intersection of variables shows that the differences between Picard and French are qualitative and not simply quantitative. In the context of the debate over the status of Northern France's obsolescent varieties, we provide empirical evidence for a mental grammar in Picard distinct from that of French, and show the relevance of comparative sociolinguistics for language planning.

This article outlines the differences in goals, methods and results that variationist researchers may encounter when exploring and/or documenting a threatened language variety, and underscores special considerations and aspects of the research program that linguists must work to control for when working with endangered varieties of Western languages. In particular, it examines questions and strategies for dealing with sparse data for longitudinal studies; fewer speakers for stratified samples; the inverse relation between linguistic fluency and age; social network constraints in small speech communities; literacy-centric exercises in oral language communities; and larger project protocols designed for stable linguistic communities. Throughout the paper, the collection and analysis of Louisiana French liaison data from 1939, 1977, and 2010 provide an application of the proposed methods.

Arabic is often investigated within dialectological frameworks that emerged in the 19th century, though that work now exists alongside decades of variationist sociolinguistic research. The latter method typically produces abundant data, recorded at very high quality, which lend themselves to being transcribed, described and preserved. This paper presents descriptive information on the Arabic dialect of Gaza City, based on recent sociolinguistic fieldwork conducted in the Gaza Strip with 39 speakers from the wider Gaza City community. These descriptive aspects of the dialect are presented as part of a broader discussion regarding the need for a more holistic integration of sociolinguistics and language description and documentation in work on understudied or endangered varieties of Arabic.

Nancy Dorian's foundational work on the loss of Gaelic in the East Sutherland communities continues to provide important insights into the nature of the process of language change in situations of obsolescence. In this article I look at a subset of Dorian's data from the perspective of current syntactic theory, and argue that the connected loss of such apparently different constructions as objects of non-finite verbs, inalienable possessive structures, and a range of passives, and the concomitant restructuring of the grammar, all follow from the interaction between a reduction in agreement features on a functional head and the broad syntactic ecology of the language. This approach makes sense of why these apparently disparate constructions all undergo the particular kinds of change that are seen, changes which are mysterious from the perspective that an obsolescing language should alter to become more like the dominant language (in this case English) which is replacing it.

Variation is described as two or more variants competing for finite resources. In this model, two outcomes are possible: language change or specialization. Specialization can be broken down further: specialization for different functions, and partial specialization – stable variation. In this paper, I analyze the differences between stable variation and language change using the two variables present in Ancient Egyptian possessive constructions. Observing four Egyptian possessive variants, split into two groups with two variants each – clitic possessor variants and full nominal possessor variants – for a total of 2251 tokens, I compare factors affecting variant choice in each possessive group. Results of distributional and multivariate analyses indicate that a) change over time occurs in clitic possession, while stable variation occurs with noun variants; and b) different kinds of factors govern the two sets: the continuous variable phrase complexity affects variant choice in nominal possession, but does not affect the clitic variants.

This paper analyzes the ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut using a variationist sociolinguistic approach. This alternation is not a typical linguistic variable, as these constructions are traditionally believed to have different syntactic functions. However, the nature of those functions remains controversial (e.g., Bittner 1987, Manga 1996), and they are undergoing changes in some dialects (e.g., Johns 2001, Carrier 2012), with the antipassive being increasingly used in place of the ergative. Thus, a variationist sociolinguistic approach is employed here to identify the significant functions of these constructions, and to find the specific context where they overlap and the language change is taking place. The study examines data collected in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, which presents a case of new-dialect formation due to the High Arctic relocation. The analysis reveals the functions of these constructions, describes the source of fading ergativity for the dialects considered in this study, and supports Trudgill's (2004) theory on new-dialect formation.

The paper surveys overlap between corpus linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics. Corpus linguistics is customarily defined as a methodology that bases claims about language on usage patterns in collections of naturalistic, authentic speech or text. Because this is what is typically done in variationist sociolinguistics work, I argue that variationist sociolinguists are by definition corpus linguists, though of course the reverse is not true: the variationist method entails more than merely analyzing usage data, and not all corpus analysts are interested in variation. But that being said, a considerable and arguably increasing number of corpus linguists not formally trained in variationist sociolinguistics are explicitly concerned with variation and engage in what I call corpus-based variationist linguistics (CVL). I first discuss what unites or divides work in CVL and in variationist sociolinguistics. In a plea to cross subdisciplinary boundaries, I subsequently identify three research areas where variationist sociolinguists may draw inspiration from work in CVL: conducting multi-variable research, paying more attention to probabilistic grammars, and taking more seriously the register-sensitivity of variation patterns.