Variability in Interlanguage: a case study

This paper presents a study dealing with variability in interlanguage. Based on the data provided by the study, it investigates the factors that can explain the variability found in a learner's interlanguage and also tries to provide evidence towards answering the question of whether interlanguage variability is systematic or not. A definition of variability is firstly discussed and after referring to the ways that variability can influence interlanguage, the various existing explanations of the phenomenon are presented. The case study is a detailed analysis of a migrant woman's interlanguage. At a first stage the analysis concentrates on whether the subject's interlanguage is systematic or not. At a second stage it tries to find which, if any, of the existing explanations of variability explain the variability found in the subject's interlanguage. The results of the analysis show that although the learner has formed a personal rule system for negation, other areas of her interlanguage cannot be explained by variable rules. This led to the assumption that although some parts of interlanguage are governed by a variable rule system, others are not. There was therefore a non-systematicity evident in the learner's interlanguage which contradicts Ellis' (1985) economy principle, Huebner's (1985) position that a learner must make functional distinctions and employ separate linguistic forms to express each function in order to communicate, as well as Andersen's "one function-one form" hypothesis. Nevertheless, a different kind of systematicity became evident in the learner's interlanguage that can only be explained by the existence of discourse domains (Selinker Douglas, 1985)