Research as conducted within the Valibel - Discours et variation centre is mainly concerned with the areas of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, minority and/or endangered languages, and prosody and focuses on the complexity and variation inherent to linguistic phenomena. Within the conglomerate of research projects, linguistics thus shows its many faces, among which lexicology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, but also sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.
In keeping with a common methodological principle, most work carried out within the Valibel - Discours et variation centre is based on the study of authentic linguistic data, taken in the context of their effective production, both in writing and in the spoken language. Such an approach allows all researchers attached to the centre to analyse the relation between linguistic performance, speaker values and their linguistic representations. As an added bonus, it also allows for an intense dialogue between theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics (corpus linguistics, language didactics, etc.).