On January 9, 2026, Prof. Laurel MacKenzie (NYU) visited our department and delivered a presentation entitled, “Where do the social and linguistic systems meet?”. The abstract is provided below:
Variation is pervasive in language, and speakers are constantly choosing between multiple ways of saying things: which word to use, how to pronounce it, how to structure the words around it in a sentence. A considerable body of research has demonstrated that this linguistic variability is not random, but rather systematically shaped by a number of factors. These "conditioning" factors include social characteristics of the speaker and of the setting, and linguistic characteristics of the utterance itself (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968; Labov 1994, 2001).
In this talk, I take up two questions concerning the nature of social conditioning that have occupied sociolinguists for decades. One asks whether variation at all levels of language is equally sensitive to social conditioning. Specifically, I interrogate the longstanding hypothesis that syntactic variation is less prone to social conditioning than variation at other levels of language (Lavandera 1978, Weiner and Labov 1983, Levon and Buchstaller 2015:322). The second question asks whether social conditioning and linguistic conditioning operate independently, or whether they can interact. In this case, I interrogate the longstanding hypothesis that the social evaluation of a variant will be consistent across the linguistic environments in which it surfaces (Labov 1993, Labov 2001:28, Labov 2010:265). I argue that both of these questions are worth pursuing, because if there are indeed some aspects of language that are “invisible” to social conditioning, this suggests something important about how the linguistic system interfaces with systems of social cognition, which models of language production will need to account for.
Drawing on data from novel analysis of spoken-language corpora, as well as a metastudy of the sociolinguistic literature, I conclude that previous researchers' contentions that social conditioning is linguistically limited are not supported by the available evidence. A number of lines of followup research present themselves to allow us to better understand where the social and linguistic systems meet.
We extend our thanks to the Guest Speakers Committee for organizing Prof. MacKenzie’s visit!