8 Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsmanterm speaker and situation related variation (SSV). It covers all relevant
features of the speech situation: not just the lectal variation that comes with
more or less permanent speaker characteristics (like being American or
British), but also the more transient, interactional characteristics of the
communicative context, like whether the speech event is a dialogue or a
monologue.
The interaction between these various dimensions has not yet been sys-
tematically investigated. Such interactions may surely be expected, and
they are likely to work in different directions. The underground/subway
case is an example of an SSV-FOV interaction, as would be choosing an
informal term rather than a more formal one according to the formality of
the speech situation. But at the same time, the choice for an informal ex-
pression might correlate with thematic factors: there might well be more
dirty words for dirty topics than colloquial words for scientific topics. Whe-
reas such a case would constitute a COV-FOV interaction, COV-SSV inte-
ractions may occur just as well. Conceptual choices, in fact, are not just
determined by the topic of a text: for a number of specific concepts, they
rather derive from the situational, interactional characteristics of the com-
municative context. Second person pronouns constitute an obvious exam-
ple: they are likely to occur typically in dialogues rather than monologues.
Similarly, persuasive texts contain different modal verbs than informative
texts.
Given such interactions, the basic research question for sociolexicology
(and more generally, for any semantically enriched type of variationist re-
search) can be defined as follows: what is the overall structure of lexical
variation in terms of the relationship between FOV, COV, and SSV? The
specific situation of sociolexicological research in the context of sociolin-
guistics follows in a straightforward way from this question: while the pa-
ragon cases of sociolinguistic research involve formal variables and a bi-
nary relationship between formal variation and lectal context,
sociolexicological research has to come to terms with a ternary relationship
between form, meaning, and context.
The second problem we have to deal with when we introduce meaning
into sociovariationist research is how to establish equivalence of meaning.
Again, we may use the lexicon as an example. Treating onomasiological
variation as a sociolinguistic variable means coming to terms with the
meaning of words: the selection of a word is also the selection of a concep-
tual category, so if we are interested in the contextual choice between syn-
onyms as an expression of sociolinguistic factors, we first need to control