This study examines the use of terminology related to syntactic variation in six linguistic journals (i.e., Corpora, the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Journal of Historical Linguistics, the Journal of Linguistics, and Syntax). Our analysis is based on a corpus consisting of articles published between 2012 and 2021. Subjecting these contributions to quantitative and qualitative analyses of the three target word pairs ‘canonical’ vs ‘non-canonical’, ‘marked’ vs ‘unmarked’, and ‘standard’ vs ‘non-standard’ revealed that the non-negated forms outmatch the negated forms in frequency. The collocation analysis showed that this can also be related to ‘marked’ being used as a past-tense verb form and ‘standard’ being used as a noun. Even though there are clear differences between journals, individual authors are also prone to favour specific terminology over other. Bigram analysis additionally revealed that the words of the three pairs are used with partially overlapping but also distinct meanings, at times reflecting ideological underpinnings. This might make it advisable for authors to explicitly reflect on their terminological choices when it comes to the description of syntactic phenomena related to (non-)canonicity.