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throughthe process of regularization, which is still ongoing in today’s English. For example,Strang (1970: 147) finds that the irregular verbs in English have been regularized about80% of the entire category since the Old English period. Culpeper (2005: 59) believesthat “the general process over time has been one of REGULARISATION, with thegradual erosion of inflectional complexity.” Similar opinions have been held by otherlinguists as well (Trask, 1996; Campbell, 2008; Millward & Hayes, 2012; etc.).To testify the regularization process in a quantitative way, corpus-basedquantitative analyses have been used in the studies of irregular verbs. Lieberman et al.investigate the change of usage frequency of 177 irregular verbs of Old Englishduring the past 1200 years in CELEX13corpus. They find that “The half-life of anirregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 timesless frequent regularizes 10 times as fast.” Michel et al. (2011) take irregular verbs asexamples to testify the relationship between frequency and the evolution trend ofgrammar. It is found that the irregular verbs with high frequencies are less likely toregularize whereas low-frequency ones are more likely to. During the past 200 years,most irregular verbs remain stable. Among them, only 16% irregular verbs haveregularized of 10% degree. The word chide is a typical example of regularization. It isalso found that PTFs ending with -t are the easiest ones to be regularized.
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Chapter 2 Theoretical Framework

This chapter illustrates the theoretical framework of this thesis, i.e. variationistsociolinguistics. It briefly reviews some representative studies in the field of variationistsociolinguistics, in which the concepts, principles and methodologies will be stated aswell. In addition, it presents the main analytical methods and recent developments in thefield of variationist sociolinguistics.

2.1 Foundational Studies of Variationist Sociolinguistics
Broadly speaking, sociolinguistics studies “the social uses of language” (Chambers,2013: 3). As a discipline with many branches, sociolinguistics diverges into manysubdisciplines in terms of the different emphasis of language in use. One of the mostproductive and flourishing area of sociolinguistic studies during the past four decadesmay be variationist sociolinguistics. According to Tagliamonte (2012: xiv), variationistsociolinguistics “is the study of linguistic variation and change through observation andinterpretation… and deals with systematic and inherent variation in languagesynchronically and diachronically.”This theory was granted its legitimate status by William Labov in 1963. In hisseries studies on Martha’s Vineyard (1963) and at Lower East Side of Manhattan (1966),Labov found that linguistic variation was influenced by social factors. For example,vowel change on Martha’s Vineyard is found degree diversity in centralization of /ay/and /aw/ among different people. Social parameters, such as age, are found to beinfluential to linguistic patterns. In other words, Labovian approach to the studies ofsociolinguistics is not restricted to the inner system of language, but aims to investigatelinguistic variation and change in specific social contexts, attempting to expose the linksbetween language and society.
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2.2 Variationist Sociolinguistics: Key Concepts and the Principleof Accountability<