Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Introduction 13

In the final chapter in this section, “Applying word space models to so-

ciolinguistics. Religion names before and after 9/11”, Yves Peirsman, Kris

Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts introduce word space models into cognitive

semantics. They emphasize the importance of usage-based studies of lexi-

cal semantics based on more advanced techniques than just the extraction

of examples from corpora. As the authors explain, by keeping track of the

contexts in which a word appears, vector space models of lexical semantics

approximate word meaning by modeling word use. To illustrate the useful-

ness of this computational-linguistic approach to lexical semantics, Peirs-

man, Heylen and Geeraerts present a case study based on a Dutch corpus of

300 million words and implement two types of word space models: a doc-

ument-based and a syntax-based approach. The case study in question

investigates how the use of religion names has changed after the attacks of

11 September 2001. The authors conclude that both the document-based

and the syntax-based model show that islam has become distributionally

more similar to words related to terrorism and politics and that christen-

dom, by contrast, remains characterized by cultural and more positive di-

mensions.

2.2. Part two. Constructional variation

This section comprises three chapters that explore a variety of topics related
to lectal variation in grammar and constructions.
The section opens with a contribution by Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, en-
titled “The English genitive alternation in a cognitive sociolinguistics pers-
pective”. In this study, which focuses on alternative constructions of geni-
tive relations in British and American English, the author first selects the
range of conditioning factors regarding choice of of-genitive vs. s-genitive
whose univariate impact has been amply documented in linguistics. As a
next step, the factors are subjected to a multivariate logistic regression
model together with data extracted from three corpora of British and Amer-
ican English. In the analysis special attention is paid to how the external,
sociolinguistic factors shape and determine the factor weights of the factors
which are internal to language. In addition to the logistic regression analy-
sis, the study furthermore relies heavily on visualization techniques such as
cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. Szmrecsanyi concludes that
the most important language-external factor working on the English geni-
tive alternation is the written/spoken text-type distinction and that the real-