Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2012

This paper explores the contexts of emergence and application of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. This novel field of scientific enquiry draws on the convergence of methods and theoretical frameworks typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. Here, we trace and systematize the key theoretical and epistemological bases for the emergence of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, by outlining main research strands and highlighting some challenges that face the development of this field. More specifically, we focus on the following terms and concepts which are foundational to the discussion of Cognitive Sociolinguistics: (i) usage-based linguistics and language-internal variation; (ii) rule-based vs. usage-based conceptions of language; (iii) meaning variation; (iv) categorization and prototypes; and (v) the interplay between language, culture, and ideology. Finally, we consider the benefits of taking a Cognitive Sociolinguistic perspective in research by looking at the actual studies that are presented in the current volume.

This paper is an effort to define the target of the language learner: asking, what are the data that the child pays attention to in the process of becoming a native speaker? In so doing, we will necessarily be engaged in the more general effort to define language itself. The general argument to be advanced here is that the human language learning capacity is outward bound, that is, aimed at the acquisition of the general pattern used in the speech community. The end result is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language production, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance.

After a period when the focus was essentially on mental architecture, the cognitive sciences are increasingly integrating the social dimension. The rise of a cognitive sociolinguistics is part of this trend. The article argues that this process requires a re-evaluation of some entrenched positions in linguistics: those that see linguistic norms as antithetical to a descriptive and variational linguistics. Once such a re-evaluation has taken place, however, the social recontextualization of cognition will enable linguistics (including sociolinguistics as an integral part), to eliminate the cracks in the foundations that were the result of suppressing the sociocultural underpinnings of linguistic facts. Structuralism, cognitivism and social constructionism introduced new and necessary distinctions, but in their strong forms they all turned into unnecessary divides. The article tries to show that an evolutionary account can reintegrate the opposed fragments into a whole picture that puts each of them in their ‘ecological position’ with respect to each other. Empirical usage facts should be seen in the context of operational norms in relation to which actual linguistic choices represent adaptations. Variational patterns should be seen in the context of structural categories without which there would be only ‘differences’ rather than variation. And emergence, individual choice, and flux should be seen in the context of the individual’s dependence on lineages of community practice sustained by collective norms.

An overview of one anthropological view of culture, including how it works and what it buys us, takes culture as a set of collective — differentially distributed — cognitive structures. Pragmatics is distinguished from semantics, and shown to seamlessly extend to non-linguistic knowledge. “Culture” is (flexibly and variably applied) shared differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge. Next come the role culture plays in regard to society and social living, and the role social groups play in culture. Our social universe is shown to be made up of a multiplicity of overlapping social groups. Prototype-extension is offered as the basis of the application of shared concepts to the experienced and imagined world. Types of cultural knowledge systems include: cultural modes of thought, cultural conceptual systems, and cultural models of action. The paper concludes with the approach’s practical implications for analysis, including two concrete examples: Old and Middle English watercourses, and alternative Fanti kinship terminological systems.

The present paper focuses on pragmatic variation between national varieties of English, reporting an experimental study conducted in the framework of variational pragmatics. It is argued that experimental methods such as dialogue production tasks do not reveal actual verbal behaviour, which is subject to the specific circumstances of concrete social situations, but the underlying behavioural norms of the respective sociocultural community of speakers. These norms emerge from repeated encounters with similar verbal behaviour in social situations of the same type and are collectively shared prototypical patterns of behaviour stored in cultural models in the long-term memory. Such cultural models specify what is expected and considered appropriate in a given type of situation. More particularly, they specify what can be said when and how, i.e. discourse topics, discourse positions and speech act realizations, as is exemplified in the empirical study reported on.

The recent decades have witnessed the incorporation of new linguistic trends into lexicography. One of these trends is a usage-based approach, with the first major application of computer-corpus data in the Collins COBUILD English dictionary (1995) and successive adaptation in other L1-dictionaries. Another, concurrent innovation — inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory — is the provision of conceptual information in monolingual dictionaries of English. So far, however, only the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners (1st and 2nd edition) has paid tribute to the fact that understanding culture-specific metaphors and being aware of metaphoric usage are crucial for learning a foreign language. Given that most of the English as lingua franca interactions take place between L2-speakers of English (see Kachru, 1994), providing conceptual information is not only a desideratum for L1- and learner dictionaries, but especially for (L2-)variety dictionaries of English. In our paper, we follow earlier tentative proposals by Polzenhagen (2007) and Wolf (2012) and present examples from A dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings & Wolf, 2011), showing how culturally salient conceptual information can be made explicit and conceptual links between lexical items retrievable. The examples demonstrate that fixed expressions and idioms — a perennial problem for lexicographers — are explicable by means of the proposed lexicographic design, too. Our approach is cognitive-sociolinguistic in that the Conceptual Metaphor approach is coupled with the study of regional varieties of English, more specifically Hong Kong English. Our analysis is empirically backed up by corpus-linguistic insights into this L2 variety.

Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds different in comparison to Turkish spoken in Turkey (TR-Turkish). Analyses of NL-Turkish spoken corpus reveal that NL-Turkish is changing through literally translated Dutch constructions. Combining the cognitive linguistics framework with methods of sociolinguistic analysis, this study investigates to what extent these attested changes are spread within the NL-Turkish speech community. Results of our experimental study show that NL-Turkish speakers recognize the changing constructions and tolerate them more than TR-Turkish speakers (control group). In addition, both NL-Turkish and TR-Turkish speakers exhibit a learning process for the changing constructions during the course of the experiment. However, we did not necessarily find a positive correlation between the frequency of changing constructions and their acceptance rate. We predict that sociolinguistic factors (e.g. group dynamics and continuous contact with TR-Turkish) influence the spread of on-going changes in NL-Turkish at the current stage of contact.

With the notable exception of the application of the metonymy model to explain stereotyping (Kristiansen, 2001), sociolinguistic language attitudes research has typically focused exclusively on explicit attitudes toward foreign accents without providing a cognitive model to explain how such attitudes are formed. At the same time, researchers in other fields have proposed the use of specific cognitive processing models such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) to explain the cognitive processes underlying reactions to foreign-accented speakers, without isolating foreign accent as an independent variable and without considering that listeners may possess different explicit and implicit attitudes towards the same speaker (e.g., Frumkin, 2007). Focusing on instances where participants exhibit different explicit attitudes toward the same foreign-accented speaker for different speaker traits (e.g., likeability versus knowledge), the present study seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of reactions to foreign accented speech by testing at which point negative attitudes toward foreign accents are formed and changed. Specifically, this research asks whether interlocutors have uniformly negative immediate associative reactions to foreign accent that are subsequently mitigated for certain judgments by propositional processes to form differing explicit attitudes, or whether the immediate reactions are ambivalent, but subsequently become negative for certain judgments through propositional processes.