free variation in pronunciation

[Dennis R. Preston]

I am away from my childhood reading at the moment, but I will check
tonight. I'm not so sure it isn't the French dialectologists rather
than the German philologists we are after here.

Bolinger, of course, showed more distributional variation within what
we might call "linguistic form" rather than that based on affective
or socially stratified or associated meanings.

dInIs

>At 8:54 AM -0400 4/3/01, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>Lynne hits the nail on the head here. I take the two forms - two
>>meanings (in the broad sense) to be a pretty good general account, so
>>much so that I would want to examine claims to the contrary (and free
>>variation is always such a claim) very carefully.
>
>Does anyone have an early cite on who said this first?  Bolinger, at
>various places, argued for a position along these lines (including
>the precept that there's no true free variation), and I've cited this
>accordingly as Bolinger's Law, but I suspect he wasn't the first, and
>that someone like Hermann Paul may have expressed a similar
>sentiment.  Can anyone pin this down a bit more?
>
>larry

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736