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date: 28 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores some of the ways in which cognitive linguists have interfaced with sociolinguistics in order to enrich and refine their analyses. It describes cognitive linguistic research on English and Dutch where the analysis benefits from taking a broader, social perspective than is usual for cognitive linguists. Furthermore, it discusses work on Lancashire dialect to illustrate some ways in which a cognitive perspective can be used to actually feed back into sociolinguistic theory and practice. The chapter also stresses the need for greater dialogue between construction grammarians and sociolinguistics in order to achieve a psychologically and socially plausible account of linguistic variation.

Keywords: cognitive linguistics, Construction Grammar, sociolinguistics, linguistic variation, frequency, schemas

Willem B. Hollmann

Willem B. Hollmann has been a Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University since 2003. His publications include articles in Cognitive Linguistics on summary vs. sequential scanning (2007) and cognitive sociolinguistics and Lancashire dialect (2011). He has published on Lancashire dialect grammar elsewhere as well, e.g. in English Language and Linguistics (2007). He has edited (with Anna Siewierska) a special issue of Functions of Language on ditransitive constructions, to which he contributed a paper as well (2007). One of the things he is working on currently is the role of phonological and distributional cues in lexical categorization. One paper on this topic will appear in a special issue of Studies in Language, which he is editing with Nikolas Gisborne.

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