Abstract
Certain properties are systematically observed across all languages : the unlimited nature of structures, hierarchical organization, displacement and so on. A central aim of General Linguistics is to list these universal properties precisely, and to understand their rationale and interrelationships. But a property perhaps even more striking than uniformity (at least, at first sight) is the variation of linguistic systems, which affects all levels of language organization. Linguistic variation is so salient that Mark Baker devotes his book The Atoms of Language (2001) to the subject : atoms are, in his view, the elements responsible for variation. In this lecture, I'd like to look at some recent versions of the generative approach to variation, and discuss the nature of the primitive ingredients of variation.
