The Quiet Demise of Variable Rules

Variable rules meet Impoverishment theory: Patterns of agreement leveling in English varieties

“…Fasold (1991), a review article on the history of variable rules as a theoretical tool, contains remarks on the ''quiet demise'' of variable rules due to the difficulty of analyzing generalized syntactic transformations, such as Move Alpha, as rules. Fasold arrives at a position of skepticism regarding the possibility of meshing quantitative analysis of sociolinguistic variables with the principles of theoretical linguistics.…”

Language contact and Spanish aspectual expression: a formal analysis

“…21 Developing such an analysis would depend in part on finding a realistic transformation that could derive the synthetic from the analytic, or vice versa. As Fasold (1991) observes, this has been a problem in variable rule analyses of syntactic variation-often there appears to be no such transformation.…”

Uma reflexão crítica sobre a teoria sociolinguística

“…Para ilustrar a dificuldade de lidar com o significado em variáveis sintáticas, Fasold (1991) fornece um caso exemplar desenvolvido por Jacobson (1989apud Fasold 1991. O autor citado analisa a alternância entre complementos do tipo to+ infinitivo e of + verbo + -ing em inglês e mostra que em decision to do it ou permission to do it o uso do complemento com to + infinitivo é invariavelmente usado, mas com probability, é usada apenas a alternativa of + verbo + -ing.…”