Parameter setting within a socially realistic linguistics

This article considers the theoretical and practical relationship between core linguistics and sociolinguistics in relation to the emergence of Principles and Parameters Theory. Parameters were introduced into core Chomskyan linguistics in an effort to account for variation between languages. However, as we argue - and as has long been known in sociolinguistics - languages (French, Italian etc.) are social rather than abstract products. In this sense, core linguistics may need to pay more attention than it has in the past to aspects of actual variation in order to understand the limits and range of parameters. Thus we argue that dialects of languages in themselves have parameters, and as such may be defined within parametric limits. Here we believe there is something of interest to sociolinguists, in terms both of structural definitions and of overall historical development. In general, then, while variation has always been central to sociolinguistics, it is now central, in one sense, to core linguistics; and here we have the opportunity to explore ways in which sociolinguistics and core linguistics may relate to each other in their interest in variation. (Parameters; variation; dialect; Belfast; Ireland)* Labov (1972:183) has argued that the use of the term sociolinguistics "is a somewhat misleading use of an oddly redundant term." The problem as Labov sees it, is that the term "sociolinguistics" implies somehow that there might be a linguistics, or a study of language, which does not consider language socially. For Labov, the study of linguistics proper is sociolinguistics. From another perspective,