6 Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman
usage-based theory of language leads to the recognition of language-
internal variety, of the kind that has been studied by sociolinguistics since
many decades.
In actual fact, although there is a growing interest within Cognitive Lin-
guistics for language-internal variation (Kristiansen 2003; Geeraerts 2005;
Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Croft 2009), it remains an understudied area.
Too often linguistic analyses or cross-linguistic comparisons are carried out
at the level of 'a language' as such, disregarding rich and complex patterns
of intralingual variation. Such a level of granularity ultimately amounts to
that of a homogeneous and thus idealized speech community. Cognitive
Linguistics, to the extent that it takes the claim that it is a usage-based ap-
proach to language and cognition seriously, cannot afford to work with
language situated taxonomically at an almost Chomskyan level of abstrac-
tion.
1.2. The cognitive perspective in sociolinguistics
Given that there appear to be compelling reasons for Cognitive Linguistics
to take language-internal variation seriously and to adopt a socio-
variationist perspective, could an analogous argumentation be formulated
from the point of view of sociolinguistics? If we start from the rich tradition
of social studies in linguistics, what would be the most obvious contribu-
tion of Cognitive Linguistics to sociolinguistics? Precisely because socio-
variationist studies within Cognitive Linguistics are as yet merely an
emerging field, we are entering largely programmatic domain with this
question. Still, the analysis that we presented in the previous section indi-
cates in what direction the answer may be sought: if the study of meaning is
the core business of Cognitive Linguistics, then that is exactly the domain
where we need to look for innovation and inspiration flowing from Cogni-
tive Linguistics to sociolinguistics. Elaborating on a phrase that we used in
the opening passage of this Introduction, there are two aspects to that ap-
proach: on the one hand, we may study variation of meaning, and on the
other, the meaning of variation. Let us try to specify both aspects.
- A most natural question to ask for Cognitive Sociolinguistics is: how
does language-internal variation affect the occurrence of linguistic pheno-
mena that have the specific attention of Cognitive Linguistics, i.e. meaning.
But as variation of meaning is a largely understudied field in sociolinguis-