The Definition of a Syntactic Variable:A Case Study of Chinese Intensifiers

A methodological problem preventing the variationists from probing into higher level grammatical variation further is the definition of a sociolingusitic variable. With a case study of Chinese intensifiers, this paper proposes a new criterion to identify a syntactic variable, namely: only when they appear in the same syntactic environment and are equivalent in syntactic meaning and grammatical funcations, will the different variants constitute a syntactic variable.