This chapter deconstructs and compares two English syntactic variables as case studies to explore the linguistic/social interface in variation. The two variables are: (1) complementizer alternation (that/Ø) and (2) subject relative pronoun alternation (who/that/Ø). While both are internally and externally conditioned, the nature and strength of the predictors (also known as factors) differ significantly. I argue that the results from quantitative linguistic analysis, statistical modelling and a comparative perspective grounded in social and historical context provide unique insight into the synergy of social, cognitive, stylistic and linguistic factors. In the case of complementizers, the overwhelming influence of verb is the linguistic footprint that a particular collocation (e.g. I think) has grammaticalized into an epistemic parenthetical away from the original matrix plus complement construction. In the case of relative pronouns, the preponderance of who for subject, animate antecedents aligns with a well-known typological pattern (i.e. human animates contrast with non-humans), which is overlain with social evaluation originating from its prestigious origins that endures in current usage in the speech community. In sum, interpreting the varying roles played by multiplex influences on linguistics features is key to understanding variation.

The introduction to this volume sums up and discusses some of the issues fundamental to the study of syntactic variation, such as the problem of semantic equivalence (since syntactic variants often have different meanings), the delimitation of syntactic alternations, the relation between linguistic and social conditioning of syntactic variables, and the explanatory frameworks that are proposed in the chapters to account for the linguistic choices speakers make when employing syntactic alternants.

Interpersonally presented emotions help to calibrate people’s orientations to things happening in the shared environment. For example, social referencing involves one person seeking clarification of the appropriate appraisal of an object, event, or person, and another person responding with an emotional orientation that disambiguates things. However, this paradigmatic case represents only one of the possible ways in which emotions affect other people’s physical or mental attitudes. In other cases, emotion-related responses affect other people’s orientations independent of their explicit informational content. Further, emotional knowledge may be co-constructed dynamically rather than transmitted unidirectionally from one person to another. In these cases, affective social learning need not involve changes in the perceived meaning of emotional objects, but rather adjustments in interactants’ orientations to what is happening. This chapter suggests ways of extending and going beyond existing methodological and theoretical approaches to emotional influence and identifies some of the blindspots of previous research.

This chapter provides a theoretical discussion of the boundaries of affective social learning (ASL), focusing on the conditions under which ASL takes place and the processes underlying ASL. In other words, the question is not so much what, but rather how we learn from others’ emotions. I propose three conditions that form a minimal requirement for others’ emotional reactions to have an initial impact on an individual: (1) the source (displaying the emotion and from whom the target learns) needs to show some emotional expression; (2) the target pays attention to the source, and is aware of the source’s focus of attention and the relevance of the emotion expression for him or her; (3) the source needs to put some trust in the source’s judgement or evaluation of the world. I next discuss the conditions under which we are most motivated to learn from others – when we are in an uncertain or ambiguous situation, for example, but also when the target experiences or expresses emotions, which can then be regulated by the source. This form of ASL may form the basis of emotional psychopathology in families, where children’s emotions are often met with depressed, anxious or indifferent reactions by their parents, through which children unintentionally learn inappropriate emotional responses. Different types of learning are then discussed that may be involved in ASL, ranging from fear conditioning to cognitive learning.