This is a detailed and meticulous study, which combines sociolinguistic methodology with a qualitative pragmatics approach.
Consequently, this study provides a window on the abiding theoretical problem of the study of lexical borrowings as sociolinguistic variables in multilingual communities in general.
Stable sociolinguistic variables are usually associated with the working class and the less educated, are stigmatized, and are often subject to correction in school.
The speech community presents special difficulties for researchers in the sociolinguistic subfield of language and gender.
In unilinguals, conceptual features may be transferred from a frequently used word to its rare quasi-synonym, possibly from a different sociolinguistic register.
The last characteristic, which has a sociolinguistic basis, has been addressed in earlier work and will not be relevant to this paper.
However, this explanation does not recognize the sociolinguistic status of the variants.
Indeed, there are parallels here among implicit learning, priming or perseveration, and sociolinguistic variation.
