SEMANTIC VARIATION

Throughout her long and distinguished career Ruqaiya Hasan has been an ardent and eloquent proponent of the stance that semantics is an important, arguably the most important, area for sociolinguistics to investigate. Semantic variation is the mother of variation in general. This ought not to be a revolutionary perspective on contemporary sociolinguistics, but it is. That is why this collection of papers all of them lucid, all of them thorough, all of them replete with either fundamental theoretical arguments or significant empirical results (or both), should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of sociolinguistics.'
Frans Gregersen
Director, the LANCHART Centre at the University of Copenhagen