Introducing sujectivities in language variation and change

This volume is devoted both to the theoretical question of which roles subjective processes play in language variation and change (LVC), and to the many methodological questions raised by the study of these subjective processes. Obviously, to talk about ‘subjective’ processes implies that there are also ‘objective’ processes, and more generally it suggests that LVC should be studied in terms of a distinction between the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’. Such a distinction is not, however, what we normally meet within the literature, where the factors involved in LVC are commonly divided and grouped in terms like internal versus external, linguistic versus social versus (socio)psychological, macro versus micro, and not to forget, the tripartite division introduced by Labov in his summing up of his own life work: internal versus social versus cognitive (Labov 1994, 2001, forthcoming.)