314 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale
- Conclusion
This article has argued, in line with the view adopted by other contributions
to this volume, that Cognitive Linguistics and sociolinguistics are not mu-
tually exclusive disciplines and, moreover, that by adopting some of the
theoretical assumptions of a usage-based model, we can reach a more ex-
planatory account of the relationship between linguistic and social variation
in the mind of the individual speaker. We have demonstrated that this is
possible in three main ways:
- By including ‘cognitive’ factor groups into a traditional multivariate
analysis and interpreting the statistical results through invoking assump-
tions of usage-based models of language structure.
- By invoking a non-modularist, network approach to meaning (including
social meaning) and beginning to understand the relationship that exists in
the mind of the speaker between social meaning and linguistic variation.
- By accepting the principle of multiple inheritance and beginning to un-
derstand how the same linguistic variable can have a range of different
social meanings within the same community.
Notes
- We are grateful to Dick Hudson and Kevin Watson for their invaluable com-
ments on an earlier draft of this paper. We would also like to acknowledge the
helpful comments from the organizers and the audience at the session on
Cognitive Sociolinguistics at ICLC (2007) where this work was originally
presented. Finally, we of course thank the two anonymous reviewers and the
editors of this volume for their comments and suggestions for improvement.
- Where excerpts are given in Scots, the English translation is provided imme-
diately following. This applied to all extracts in the article.
- ‘Weegie’, ‘Scouse’ and ‘Geordie’ are terms used to describe natives of the
cities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne respectively.
- See section 3.2 for a fuller discussion of this as a method of data collection.
- WFHPB is socially fairly homogeneous and so it is not possible to stratify the
speakers by social class.
- Females also showed higher proportions of TH-Fronting in the Glasgow cor-
pus collected in 1997 but in the corpus collected in 2003, males were using
the labiodental variant more than females (see Stuart-Smith and Timmins
2006).
- GOLDVARB X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte, and Smith 2005) was used to per-
form the varbrul analysis in this research.
