Introduction.
Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics
Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman
Cognitive Sociolinguistics is a novel and burgeoning field of research
which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of
language at a usage-based level. The ten chapters compiled in the present
volume grew out of presentations at the Theme Session “Cognitive Soci-
olinguistics”, celebrated at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Con-
ference in Krakòw, Poland. While the first volume to bear the title Cogni-
tive Sociolinguistics (Kristiansen and Dirven 2008) took a fairly broad view
on the field by exemplifying a variety of areas where sociolinguistics and
Cognitive Linguistics meet in natural manners, this volume focuses specifi-
cally on language-internal variation and methodological advances in the
field. Emphasis is on empirical usage-based variation research and as a
natural corollary also on the methods of cognitive sociolinguistic inquiry.
The ten studies brought together in Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguis-
tics, then, are tied together by theoretical, methodological, and descriptive
characteristics. Theoretically speaking, Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguis-
tics brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of
language-internal variation. Methodologically speaking, all ten contribu-
tions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based
techniques, experimental methods and survey-based research, or a combi-
nation of these. The search for methods that may adequately unravel the
complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between
conceptual meaning and variationist factors is thus another characteristic of
the volume. Finally, in terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers
three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional var-
iation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates
how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and
the meaning of variation.
In this Introduction, we will first introduce Cognitive Sociolinguistics as
a convergence of the concerns of sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguis-
tics. In particular, we will try to indicate how both traditions may profit
from a confrontation. The second part of the Introduction summarizes the