This article concerns the interrelation between the theoretical status and the social dimensions of syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch. I discuss syntactic variation in Heerlen Dutch, which consists of (i) a range of dative constructions that are acceptable in the Heerlen dialect but unacceptable in Standard Dutch and (ii) Standard Dutch variants of the dative constructions that are rare in the Heerlen dialect. The theoretical primitive causing syntactic variation is taken to be the different values or settings of a parameter. Although all local dialect constructions in Heerlen Dutch seem superficially similar because they are construed with a dative NP or the reflexive zich, I argue that these constructions must be attributed to two distinct parameters. The different social distributions of dative constructions in Heerlen Dutch are a confirmation that two distinct parameters are involved.

This article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event.

A variationist account of how direct quotations are framed in spoken Spanish requires definition of the variable and the envelope of variation followed by investigation of linguistic, stylistic, and social constraints. The variable is defined as a set of three strategies for directly quoting the speech, gestures, and sound effects of people, animals, or things in the natural world, real or imagined, faithfully or not. These strategies involve verbs of direct report, a bare noun phrase (Y yo, “¡¿Ay qué hago?!” ‘And I, “Oh, what should I do?’), and freestanding quotation with no frame. Investigation of linguistic constraints finds influence both from within and above the sentence. These include clause type, person, number, animacy of speaker, quotation content, switch reference, and a “birds of a feather” effect. Data on stylistic constraints provide evidence for style as a function of attention to form. Social constraints reveal complicated, yet familiar influences of age, sex, and class, with teenagers showing parallels to Eckert's work on gender and variation. Evidence also emerges for both age grading and a change in progress.