Definitions

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  • noun linguistics A person who studies variation in usage among speakers of the same language

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Pre-variationists tended to provide transformationist answers to the questions, but diverged from pure transformationists by tending somewhat variationist.

    Intuitive Essentialism (IV) 2006

  • However, is it really true, as Shtulman says, that what is misleading the non-variationist groups is the same thing that led earlier biologists, like Lamarck, Cope, and Haeckel, astray, namely, that species have essences and that the essences of species change over time?

    Intuitive Essentialism (IV) 2006

  • While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts.

    AvaxHome RSS: 2009

  • The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

    AvaxHome RSS: 2009

  • So there are (at least) five kinds of transformist, all of which accept that biological species can transform , but which disagree on the mechanism: the pure variationist (external factors alone), the orthogeneticist (the 'volition' or tendency of the plant itself), the Lamarckian ('habit' or accumulation of characteristics), the saltationist; and the selectionist (Darwinian).

    Essentialisms in Biology (II) 2006

  • Ty et al’s tangent reminded me of this Spanish phonology class, when this teacher openly recognized the inherent contradiction in his teaching–he approached phonology from a sociolinguistic, “variationist” perspective a la Labov, but when evaluating our pronunciation he told us it was “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”…clearly he recognized that communication and mutual understanding were the important things, not obtaining a perfect “Español latinoamericano estándar” accent.

    The NEST/non-NEST debate « Ken Wilson's Blog 2009

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