last changed 7 August 2007
Journal of Linguistics, 43, 683-694, 2007
Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in Buckie. Thanks to the feature analysis of pronouns, his analysis provides two ‘routes’ to we was and you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter but without including either social or quantitative information in the grammar. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important differences due to sex and age as well as between we and was; hardly any social groups show the average 2:1 ratio; variation applies beyond inflected words so any general account of variation will explain the was/were variation without invoking inflectional features; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than a modular one.