One of the postulates of the language of the early twentieth century is that the object of linguistics should be identified with the homogeneous part of the observable phenomena. In the second half of this century, sociolinguistics represented a significant break with the theoretical formalism by introducing the concept of linguistic variable, but at the same time, it got closed do it by adopting the concept of variable rule. This paper aims to discuss this position critically by enhancing the need for re-propose more fully the speaker as an agent driving his own speech and therefore the concept of linguistic variable as the privileged space of the construction of the social significance of language.
sociolinguistics; variable rule; categoricity axiom; formalism; functionalism