Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 25And third, the paper is a contribution to dialectological studies within
Cognitive Linguistics. Because language-internal variation has only recent-
ly come to the attention of Cognitive Linguistics (see Kristiansen 2003,
Geeraerts 2005, Bernárdez 2005, Kövecses 2005, Kristiansen and Dirven
2008), it comes as no surprise that non-standard variants of a language have
for long decades been neglected in cognitive linguistic studies. In spite of
pioneering but largely isolated efforts such as Moerdijk and Geeraerts
(1991), Swanenberg (2000), Nilsson (2001), Berthele (2002, 2004, 2006),
Sharifian (2005), Szelid and Geeraerts (2008), there is no standing tradition
of dialectological research in Cognitive Linguistics. That is to be regretted,
because the inspiration could well be mutual. On the one hand, dialectolog-
ical data raise the question whether differences of culture and conceptuali-
zation, one of the theoretical centers of attraction of Cognitive Linguistics,
could be detected language-internally (and not just, according to the usual
perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, across languages). On the other hand,
the usage-based nature of Cognitive Linguistics challenges the traditional
methodological focus of dialectology on language structure rather than
language use. In this paper, we offer one more example of what such a
cognitive linguistic dialectology could look like.
- Sketching the design
How then shall we try to answer our basic research question? In order to
specify the design of our study, we need to say something about the materi-
al that we will be using as the descriptive basis of our investigation, about
the explanatory variables that we will include, and about our operationali-
zation of the response variable. In the presentation of the design and the
results, we will keep the exposé deliberately brief and fairly abstract, i.e. in
order to concentrate on the essential architecture of the approach, we will
not attempt to illustrate each successive step with numerous examples, nor
with technical details about the calculations used. For additional detail, we
refer to Speelman and Geeraerts (2009), a follow-up study that compares
the methodology presented here with alternative approaches to lexical di-
alectometry.