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Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two 'routes' to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]