What carries greater social weight, a linguistic variant’s local use or its typical use?

When socially evaluating a speaker, listeners partially rely on context-dependent expectations, giving greater social penalties for using a marked form in a less expected context. The nature of listeners’ expectations can be based on the context in which a form is produced in the current utterance (local use), as well as cumulative information about the context in which a form tends to be produced (typical use). This paper asks which of these kinds of expectations about the English sociolinguistic variable (ING), as in talking vs. talkin, is most relevant to listeners in making social judgments. Results indicate that (ING) words’ typical grammatical functions (as a noun vs. a verb) contributed to social judgments, while the local grammatical use of (ING) words did not, supporting usage-based theories and raising new questions about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie social evaluations based on speech.