Lecture 11: Language Variation and Change Sir Michael Dummett ( ) (One kind of) variation shows that language cannot be an individual, I-language thing Language exists independently of any particular speaker An individual speaker has only a partial (and sometimes wrong) grasp of this community language (from Hale (1998: Figure 1)) Consider the following two subjects, whose PLD consists of a mixture of two different systems For reference, lets call system 1 English and system 2 Spanish Consolidation (All is revealed!)