Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Mental models of linguistic varieties 275

viding visual and other metaphorical source domains for the construal of
esthetic judgments and argumentative trains of thoughts about language. It
is neither the case that individuals have to select categorically one of the
two models as a guiding model, nor do individuals always have to apply the
same models in a similarly balanced way. However, particular cultural dis-
course contexts, such as the “republican” ideology in France, can clearly
favor one model at the expense of the other, and there is no doubt that such
entrenched cultural ways of construing language leave their traces in the
minds of the members of the speech community.

dialect :

romantic model

home,

bond (community),

soul, ...

st andard:

rationalist model

tool, bridge,

structure, ...

barrier,

resource

competing/partial models of a “ cultural cluster model” :

-> Romantic component ~ dialects

-> Rationalist component ~ standard

Figure 2. The cluster model of languages and dialects; integrating the cultural
models of standardization and some metaphorical models

The concept of this cluster model also accounts for the often perceived
internal inconsistencies in the folk’s ideas about language – or for the gen-
eral finding that people’s mental models of all kinds of objects are inconsis-
tent (cf. the pastiche model, Collins and Gentner 1987). In our case, the
analysis presented above can easily account for a fact that has only been
poorly understood in sociolinguistics: if the hypothesis of the cluster model
is correct, then it comes as no surprise that people can attribute prestige
both to the standard language and to the dialect. The construct of “covert
prestige” (Labov 1966, Trudgill 1983) is the sociolinguistic concept that