Introduction 7tics, that alone might suffice to accept Cognitive Sociolinguistics as a wel-
come addition to sociolinguistics. The importance of meaning for sociolin-
guistics is even more fundamental, however, because questions of meaning
implicitly lie at the heart of the sociolinguistic enterprise as a whole. This
can be easily understood if we take into account that the standard metho-
dology of socio-variationist research involves the concept of a ‘sociolin-
guistic variable’. Put simply, a sociolinguistic variable in the sense of con-
temporary sociolinguistics is a set of alternative ways of expressing the
same linguistic function or realizing the same linguistic element, where
each of the alternatives has social significance: ‘Social and stylistic varia-
tion presuppose the option of saying ‘the same thing’ in several different
ways: that is, the variants are identical in reference or truth value, but op-
posed in their social and/or stylistic significance’ (Labov 1972: 271). As
such, a sociolinguistic variable is a linguistic element that is sensitive to a
number of extralinguistic independent variables like social class, age, sex,
geographical group location, ethnic group, or contextual style and register.
Given, then, that the very notion of a sociolinguistic variable refers to
meaning, it is important for sociolinguistic studies to devote specific atten-
tion to semantics – all the more so since specific difficulties arise when
dealing with meaning: the interaction of meaning with other sources of
variation, and the problem of semantic equivalence. We may illustrate both
problems by having a closer look at lexical meaning, but the problems that
we mention for lexical meaning clearly also apply to grammatical and other
types of meaning.
First, observe that lexical choices in discourse may be determined by
different factors: next to (obviously) the topic of the text, there is variation
of a sociolinguistic or stylistic nature: at least for a number of concepts, a
speaker of British English, for instance, will make different lexical choices
than a speaker of American English. Choices of this kind often involve
differences between language varieties. Lexical choices of this type are not
choices for specific concepts (like the topic-related choices would be), but
they are choices for one word rather than the other expressing the same
concept: we can recognize American English when we come across the
word subway in contrast with British English underground, but the type of
public transport referred to is the same. We may call this type of variation
(i.e. the subway/underground type) formal onomasiological variation
(FOV), in contrast with conceptual onomasiological variation (COV),
which involves thematic choices, like talking about public transport rather
than beer, biology, or Bach. For the third type of variation, we may use the