The definition of the variable

Although ING is one of the most familiar sociolinguistic variables, defining it precisely and circumscribing its context of occurrence are not easy tasks. In neutral terms, ING is the alternation between unstressed /ing/ and /in/, which might be exemplified using a pro- gressive participle likeworking: the standard engma-final pronunciationworkingalternates with the /n/-final pronunciation commonly spelledworkin’. The grammatical conditioning of the variable has been emphasized in literature on the topic, with the basic generalization being that the /ing/ variant is more frequent with noun-like things and the /in/ variant is more frequent with verb-like things. However, Labov noted 40 years ago that “there are a number of technical questions in the definition of this variable which have not always been given the attention they deserve” (1972, 238); I contend that the same could still be said even though important progress has been made in understanding the variable’s ori- gins (Houston, 1985; Labov, 1989) and social perception (Campbell-Kibler, 2011; Labov et al., 2011). The core unsettled question is whether the variation in ING is phonological or morphological.

For ING, as for other variables, it is necessary to properly define the variable in order to study its quantitative behavior, but also necessary to study the variable’s quantitative behavior in order to define it properly. This problem is brought into particularly sharp focus by the demands of persistence coding, where the potential sequential dependence of tokens means that decisions about tokens in certain contexts cannot be put off as outside the realm of the study. Finding the answer to this ultimately-empirical question, though, is indispensable for making decisions about the inclusion or exclusion of different sets of lexical items within the definition of the variable.

stance against “the naive approach...neglecting unstressed -inginsomethingandnothing” (Labov, 1972, 238) and giving the definition of the variable using variable-rule notation over distinctive features. It was not long, though, before the variable was recast as a choice between two allomorphs, /ing/ and /in/. This morphological account has perhaps been fa- vored in recent work, at least in part because it is consistent with the variable’s origin in the conflation and competition of two distinct Old English suffixes, participial -inde/endeand the verbal noun ending -inge/ynge (Houston, 1985; Labov, 1989). A consequence of the morphological account, though, is that the alternation between /ing/ and /in/ in presumably- simple nouns, likemorningandceiling, as well as in the quantifierssomethingandnothing, must be attributed to a different source because these words do not contain a distinct mor- pheme to serve as the locus of variable allomorphy. This is somewhat dissatisfying in that not only does the variation across these cases appear in identical form on the surface, but also these forms seem intuitively to serve the same stylistic purpose regardless of whether they are plausibly analyzed as a distinct morpheme or not. Whether or not the latter issue is a problem depends on what approach to style is assumed.

The tension between these two types of accounts continues to appear throughout recent decades. Labov (2001a) defines the variable in terms of the unstressed syllable, suggest- ing a phonological view, while Labov et al. (2011) explicitly take the position that the variable is morphological. Labov (2001c) encapsulates the field’s uncertainty. He first states that “the overall envelope of variation includes words with the suffix -ing, monomor- phemic nouns likemorningandceiling, and compounds with -thing: nothing, something. It therefore appears that it must be defined as a phonological alternation that affects all un- stressed /ing/ syllables” (Labov, 2001c, 79). Later in the same chapter, however, he asserts that “something and nothing are excluded from the nominal sub-group because they ex- hibit much higher levels of apical realization, and appear to form a different sociolinguistic variable” (Labov, 2001c, 79). Since it has long been recognized that variation can occur

at different rates in grammatical contexts without needing to treat the various contexts as separate variables, I would suggest that evidence independent of variant rates is of impor- tance for making these kinds of definitional decisions. However, some of the more recent ING studies, perhaps out of frustration with this seeming unsolvable problem, sidestep the difficult question of what is “in” and “out” of the variable context.

I offer these observations to highlight the lack of consensus that remains after a half- century of intensive quantitative inquiry into the nature of this variable. In section 3.2.3 I will argue that the persistence behavior of different types of ING tokens can guide us towards a more empirically-grounded definition of the variable, although questions will remain. First, though, I will revisit the definition of the grammatical categories themselves. While the main point of grammatical interest has been differences in ING rates across the categories, and the main point of contention has been whether all of these categories need to be distinguished or even belong inside the envelope of variation, a preliminary step is the definition of those categories. It is not always clear that different studies have taken the same approach to classifying tokens from the messy world of real speech into any particular set of ING categories. In the following section I propose to reorganize the basic ING grammatical categories and pair them with usable classification diagnostics as well as current morphological analyses.