294 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdalemodel has been readily applied to phonological variation by, for example,
Docherty and Foulkes (2006) and Docherty (2008). While we are sympa-
thetic to some versions of exemplar theory, we argue (as with Bybee 2001)
that speakers not only store exemplars in episodic memory, but also that
they abstract away from such exemplars to form a specific network in cog-
nition, where a particular instance of a phoneme category serves as the
prototype and others serve as context-specific extensions from that proto-
type. ‘Context’ refers not only to the linguistic context in which the sound
appears, but also the (immediate and wider) social context in which the
sound is used (Kristiansen 2006: 116). This is discussed in some detail in
section 4.
One attractive aspect of exemplar theory for cognitive sociolinguistics is
its application within the domain of social psychology. For instance, Roth-
bart and Lewis (1988) have shown that social categorization relies on hu-
mans’ ability to perceive and rank more highly canonical over non-
canonical exemplars in any given category. They argue that in cases of
multiple inheritance, any individual will be stored or associated with a cat-
egory to which they conform most clearly (e.g. a female rock climber
would be categorized as ‘athlete’ more readily than as ‘woman’), which
extends to issues of attribute ranking. They also provide evidence to sug-
gest that goodness of exemplar categorization is as prevalent in social cate-
gorization as it is in linguistic categorization. The critical issues which arise
from such exemplar approaches to linguistic and social cognition are:‐ that social and linguistic categories are formed using the same general
principles (Hudson 1996)
‐ that multiple inheritance helps to explain how entities may be simulta-
neously instances of more than one category (Hudson 2007a and b)
‐ that peripheral members of both linguistic and social categories may
still be accorded membership of the group on the basis of partial sanc-
tion (Langacker 1987, 1991).In this regard, the account of phonological categories put forward by, for
example, Mompean-Gonzalez, is equally applicable to sociolinguistic the-
ory. He writes: “the phoneme category /t/, for example, could be conceived
of as a category of sounds embedded in a wider network of knowledge
structures from which the relevant attributes characterizing the category are
drawn” (Mompean-Gonzalez 2004: 442), and such a wider network of
structures may include sociolinguistic phenomena such as discourse context