Cognitive sociolinguistics

УДК 81'272 КОМУНІКАТИВНА СТРАТЕГІЯ ХЕДЖУВАННЯ В ДИСКУРСІ ПОЛІТИЧНОГО ІНТЕРВ'Ю (гендерний аспект) Курченко Ліна Миколаївна канд. філол. наук Київський національний університет імені Тараса Шевченка У статті аналізуються дискурсивні особливості фемінінної та маскулінної комунікації. На матеріа-лі телевізійних інтерв'ю впливових політиків України та Німеччини розглядаються гендерні особли-вості комунікативної стратегії хеджування. Ключові слова: гендер, дискурс, комунікативна стратегія, хеджування, інтерв'ю. Одним із перспективних напрямків гендерної лінгвістики є дослідження особли-востей комунікації жінок і чоловіків у різних дискурсах. До визначних досліджень проблем взаємодії гендеру та дискурсу належать праці Р. Лакофф, Д. Таннен, Р. Водак, Дж. Вуд та ін. На великому масиві емпіричних даних методом інтерак-ційного аналізу було багаторазово доведено, що дискурсивні практики чоловіків (або, за визначенням конструктивістів, маскулінних осіб) та жінок (фемінінних осіб) суттєво різняться між собою, що призводить до встановлення комунікативної асиметрії на користь чоловіків і закріплює їхній домінуючий соціальний статус. У цій статті ми ставимо за мету узагальнити наукові дані про гендерні відмінності комунікативних стилів, а також встановити, наскільки притаманна жінкам-полі-тикам стратегія хеджування в дискурсі телеінтерв'ю, коли комунікація відбувається досить спонтанно і текст мало підлягає редагуванню. Новизна роботи полягає в тому, що вперше ця стратегія розглядається під компаративним кутом зору: з ген-дерних позицій будуть проаналізовані телеінтерв'ю впливових політиків Німеччини і України німецькою, українською та російськими мовами. Професор Оксфордського університету Дебора Таннен наголошує на тому, що "вивчення функціонування комунікативних стилів у процесі інтеракції допомогає пояснити, яким чином через взаємодію дійсно створюється домінування" [Tannen 1996, 10]. Твердження про те, що такі соціальні відносини, як домінування і підлег-лість, конструюються в процесі інтеракції, складає, за Д. Таннен, саму філософ-ську основу і основне досягнення інтеракційного соціолінгвістичного аналізу мов-лення. Вона так формулює фундаментальні положення інтеракційної соціолінгвіс-тики: 1) соціальні ролі не є даністю, вони створюються в процесі інтеракції; 2) кон-текст не є даністю, він конституюється через мовлення і дії; 3) все, що виникає під час інтеракції, є продуктом не однієї особи, а спільним продуктом комунікантів; 4) значення слів та інших лінгвістичних ознак (перебивання, обсяги говоріння то-що) ніколи не можуть стовідсотково збігатися з комунікативним наміром комуні-канта, оскільки це значення реалізується лише в конкретних рамках (frame) і в кон-кретному контексті [Tannen 1996, 10-11]. Не погоджуючись з крайнім релятивіз-мом Д. Таннен, ми вважаємо, що дискурсивну інтеракцію в кінцевому підсумку слід розглядати як продукт історичного розвитку суспільства, як результат інкуль-турації комунікантів у конкретному соціальному середовищі. Проте важливий мо

Work in Spanish
Abstract and conclusions available in the text in English, French, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic according to the index

Título en español:
La jaquetía de la comunidad judía de Melilla en el siglo XXI: entre remanentes léxicos, la intimidad e Israel. Aproximación aplicada a una etnovariedad desde la sociolingüística cognitiva y su relación con la percepción.

Resumen en español:

Palabras clave: Melilla, jaquetía, etnovariedad, sociolingüística cognitiva, percepción.

La tesis recoge una propuesta lexicográfica en jaquetía (etnovariedad del judeoespañol) a partir de los lemas que la comunidad judía de Melilla incluye en su habla entre 2014 y 2017. Dicha propuesta se ha elaborado combinando los datos obtenidos en entrevistas y cuestionarios de campo llevados a cabo a los miembros de esta comunidad y sus descendientes y relacionados que residen en la ciudad, en el resto de España o en el extranjero, especialmente en Israel (capítulos II y III).

El marco teórico central se apoya en la sociolingüística cognitiva y las amplias posibilidades aplicadas que ofrece la corriente para el estudio de etnovariedades. La tesis igualmente relaciona el habla de las etnias con la percepción y la incidencia de esta en los hablantes y la academia. Se emplean, como novedad, distintas tomas de datos modulares que permiten reforzar la información en las diferentes fases del proceso. Asimismo, el estudio guarda una relación considerable con la antropología y la etnografía relacionándose algunos conceptos y métodos de estas ciencias con la producción lingüística de los hablantes (capítulo I).

Tras presentar el papel de la jaquetía en la academia y en la política lingüística española, se contabilizan y analizan los principales rasgos y fenómenos lingüísticos observados, estos se relacionan con otras etnovariedades para comparar la similitud de patrones en cuanto a la evolución y/o vigencia de la jaquetía se refiere a la vez que se aporta una aproximación para contribuir y abordar en el futuro este tipo de estudios sobre hablas minoritarias (capítulos I, III y IV).

La originalidad del trabajo reside en el enfoque comunicativo sobre un habla oral que en su estadio de extinción está incluso estandarizando su escritura a través de mensajes privados de WhatsApp y Facebook. Por otro lado, se muestra un uso intracomunitario relacionado con la intimidad de los hablantes no presentado con anterioridad para las etnovariedades, ya que normalmente estas se asocian con el humor en el caso de la jaquetía o la delincuencia si se hace referencia al caló (capítulos I y IV).

El estudio trata de resolver la aparente antonimia entre lo que la jaquetía de Melilla es, es decir, energía, producción, uso, variedad cultural o etnovariedad; y lo que los lingüistas y los hablantes, aquí informantes, creen que es como resultado de sus investigaciones y percepciones respectivamente (capítulo IV).

Por último, se presentan los fenómenos extralingüísticos relacionados con el habla y la evolución de esta en la comunidad de descendientes judíos melillenses en Israel así como la convergencia de la jaquetía al hebreo y al español y divergencia del elemento árabe (capítulo IV).

A language is considered as a sexist language if it conveys attitudes that stereotype a person according to gender rather than judging on individual merits. Feminists believe that English language is a sexist language because it involves negative attitudes towards women and maintains social inequalities between men and women. There are many English metaphors used to describe women in disagreeable manner, but this is rarely a case with men. Animal, food and villainous imageries are highly used to refer to women, such as: bitch, chick,-sugar, honey, tomato,-witch and so on. Animal imageries compare women with helpless creatures, food imageries with items used for sustenance and pleasure, and villainous imageries with evil creatures. More or less, in every society, women are believed to be weak and subordinate to men who are considered to be masculine. Even by linguistic items, men are presented as the head of societies. English morphology generally takes the male form as the base form, and adds suffix to construct the female form, for example: lion-lioness, tiger-tigress, actor-actress, etc. Suffix 'ess' carries connotations of lack of seriousness. By using the words 'he' and 'man' as generic forms, women are kept invisible and undermined. My first language is Bengali, so it was a question as to whether my language is also a sexist one. Sexism is also a usual feature of Bengali language, and even a careless observation on daily language can help identify the presence of sexism in Bengali. Women are sometimes referred by the following villainous imageries: Rakkhoshi (রাক্ষসী) = female monster; daini (ডাইনী) = witch. Even in terms of morphology, male form appears to be the base form in Bengali language, such as: chakor-chakrani (চাকর-চাকরানী) = servant-maidservant, shingho-shinghi (সসিংহ-সসিংহী) = lion-lioness, etc. Even names of Bengali children follow sexism; a male child is never named Nodi (নদী) = river and a female child is never named Shagor (সাগর) = sea. Even by means of names, men are presented as a strong figure and women as the subordinate figures who possess lesser strength comparing to their opposite gender. From the above discussion, it is obvious that both Bengali and English are sexist languages; delve into your language to discover sexism in your language.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics is a novel and burgeoning field of research which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of language at a usage-based level. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All ten contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimental methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. The search for methods that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors is thus another characteristic of the volume. In terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional variation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation.

Este estudio investiga la producción a través del role-play de tres actos de habla en español por parte de tres grupos diferentes de hablantes: nativos de español, nativos de inglés con un nivel avanzado de español, y nativos de inglés con un nivel intermedio de español. Se han tenido en cuenta variables como el nivel de los estudiantes, su experiencia en el extranjero, cuántos años llevaban estudiando la lengua o su propia autopercepción del nivel que tienen. Las transcripciones de los 108 vídeos grabados se han clasificado de acuerdo con los tres actos de habla, los tres grupos, y las estrategias de acción y reacción de cada acto de habla que habían establecido investigaciones anteriores.
Los resultados muestran que los grupos difieren entre sí tanto en la interpretación de cada uno de estos actos de habla como en las estrategias utilizadas para producirlos y reaccionar a ellos, tanto verbal como gestualmente, demostrando así que la competencia pragmática no se ha adquirido al mismo nivel que la competencia gramatical en los estudiantes del grupo avanzado. Se ha podido observar, pues, transferencia negativa tanto en las estrategias utilizadas, como en la extensión y el número de los turnos producidos en los grupos de hablantes no nativos.
Como producto final, además de esta tesis, se ha creado un corpus multimodal al cual tanto investigadores como profesores y alumnos podrán acceder fácilmente a través de internet para poder trabajar con los vídeos y sus transcripciones, las cuales pueden ser descargadas fácilmente.

Palabras clave: corpus, corpus multimodal, pragmática, actos de habla, competencia pragmática, lenguaje no verbal, ELE, adquisición de segundas lenguas, adquisición de lenguas extranjeras, SLA, FLA, FTA, actos amenazantes para la imagen, pragmática intercultural, pragmática sociocognitiva, sociolingüística, rechazo, cumplido, disculpa.

Linguistic taboo has been relegated for a long time to a peripheral position within Linguistics, due to its social stigmatization and inherent linguistic complexity. Recently, though, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting the phenomenon, especially from cognitive frameworks. This volume is the first collection of papers dealing with linguistic taboo from that perspective.

The volume gathers 15 chapters, which provide novel insights into a broad range of taboo phenomena (euphemism, dysphemism, swearing, political correctness, coprolalia, etc.) from the fields of sexuality, diseases, death, war, ageing or religion. With a special focus on lexical semantics, the authors in the volume work within Cognitive Linguistics frameworks such as conceptual metaphor and metonymy, cultural conceptualization or cognitive sociolinguistics, but also at the interface of pragmatics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, cognitive science or psychiatry.

This volume provides theoretical reflections and case studies based on new methods and data from varied languages (English, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Persian, Gikũyũ and Egyptian Arabic). As such, it moves towards a new generation of linguistic taboo studies.

Two key elements reveal a step change in Sociolinguistics towards a more flexible perspective: the study of semantic variation and the inclusion of microsociological variables. This article is a theoretical proposal to combine the two perspectives that are responsible for this change: respectively, Cognitive Sociolinguistics and the Third Wave of Variation Studies. The theoretical connections between the two are located and the program for a Third Wave Cognitive Sociolinguistics is exposed. Combining objectives, methods and tools, this paper
emphasizes the need to investigate how semantic variation creates social meaning. Unlike cognitive sociolinguistic works so far, the proposal defends a “more sociolinguistic” perspective, both in data collection and in the interpretation of the meaning of variation for speakers as social agents, as in the Third Wave.

The dissemination of the standard form of the language has not always been easy for such languages as Catalan. Even so, the standard form of Catalan has taken root among the Valen-cian people with a certain success (Segura, 2003; Baldaquí, 2015). Recently, however, the publication of the Diccionari normatiu valencià (DNV, AVL) has marked a partial change in the lexical component of the standard language for Valencian Catalan. This paper deals with some words which do not appear in the prescriptive dictionary (Diccionari de la llengua cata-lana, DIEC2, IEC), such as clevill, gasto, roín and ximenera, but which are indeed included in the DNV, as well as other words which are secondary forms in the DIEC2 but primary in the DNV, thus giving preference to vacacions, parat, catxerulo and entropessar as opposed to vacances, aturat, milotxa and ensopegar, to give some examples. This study is based on surveys among young Valencians. They have been asked about their lexical preferences regarding some words in the standard form of the language. Our aim is to assess the degree of introduc- tion and dissemination of different words and the attitudes young people show with respect to them. Following a cognitive sociolinguistics approach (Geeraerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman, 2010), the findings of this study show that the standard form of Valencian is prototypically formed by the words of the general standard form of Catalan and of the so-called convergent standard.

Within sociocognitive linguistics, the notions of social knowledge and its structures are central. Cognitive researchers have offered a number of terms to refer to these structures: social stereotypes, context models, ICM, cultural scripts. Offering the notion of sociocultural model (SCM), the author distinguishes between two types of SCM–for social prescription and social adaptation. Prescriptive models are usually fixed, conceptually determined and reproduced (games, rituals, kinship terms, etc.). SCM for social adaptation are more variable, indeterminate and can be produced in discourse (e.g. social prestige).
A corpus analysis of semantic and functional features of Russian and English words of prestige shows that the model of prestige consists of two components – propositional and evaluative. The first one is fixed and represents general relations between prestigious objects and people. The second component is a scale of prestige, with entities being evaluated against it. Since the criteria for evaluation can be unclear (prestigious cars vs. prestigious professions), the SCM of prestige becomes partially indeterminate.
The study of multimodal TV commercials supports the idea that with the status symbols that are widely recognized as prestigious objects (e.g. expensive watches or cars), the SCM of prestige becomes less explicit verbally, more explicit visually, and displays more variation in discourse. An added benefit of the distinction between prescriptive and adaptive SCM is that they become an effective instrument for the analysis of different types of discourse.

This chapter provides an overview of cognitive sociolinguistics, framed in such a way that opportunities for new research should become apparent. In order to achieve this, I relate cognitive sociolinguistics to the domains of inquiry from which both cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics have themselves emerged, i.e. cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology and of course linguistics itself. Emphasis is paid to the influence and value of these fields in terms of both methodology and theory. From a sociology of science perspective, I suggest that although some of the most prominent sociolinguists remain reluctant to engage with cognitive linguistics, there are now also some clear signs of change in this respect. This is positive for the development of cognitive sociolinguistics, but cognitive linguists can in fact also do more to advance the field by engaging not just with sociolinguistic theory but also with the sociolinguistic community.

(This is just the abstract - the publisher has requested that we do not release our actual papers publicly for two years.)

This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraertz et al 2010, Pütz et al 2014) as well as to the studies of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975/2004, Takemaru 2010) and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture.

To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2013). The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly "penis") and one for female genitals (manko, roughly "vulva" or "vagina") were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The corpus was selected in part because other corpora investigated suffered from data sparsity, which is not surprising considering the highly taboo nature of the terms investigated. The jpTenTen11 corpus contains more than 50,000 tokens of all four terms, permitting confidence in the statistical methods used, but at a price: while I seek to study the relevant metaphors in Japanese culture in general, these data may only provide insight into language use on the internet, and conclusions may not generalize to the broader culture.

The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like "penis"), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like "pecker") to playfully sexual (possibly like "dick"), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like "cock"). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers' deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai "large" and futoi "thick" are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai "small" and hosoi "thin" are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations).

As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both "erotic"), in many constructions-far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men's genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a "pure" version of this organ, like uiuisii "innocent", itaike "innocent, helpless", and osanai "immature, young" as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose", fushidara "loose, sluttish", and midara "sluttish, promiscuous, dirty". These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men.

The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman('s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. Eroticism and dirtiness are not distinguished in terms for men's or women's genitalia. However, only the women seem to suffer the consequences of engaging in sexuality. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.

Work Cited
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen, and Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.

Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neural-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech.  Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, Robin. 1975/2006. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Pütz, Martin, Justyna A. Robinson, and Monika Reif (eds.). 2014. Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Srdanović, Irena, Vit Suchomel, Toshinobu Ogiso, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2013. 百億語のコーパスを用いた日本語の語彙・文法情報のプロファイリング (Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus jpTenTen). Proceedings of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 2013, 229-238.

Takemaru, Naoko. 2010. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London, McFarland & Company.

Endangered languages from sociolinguistic and metaphorical perspectives
The opinions on language esp. endangered language are an important indicator of particular language situation.  At the same time, current theoretical approaches as well as language policies don’t always take them into account. The language ideologies in Ukraine are notable for the concept of ‘language under threat’, which refers not only to minor languages listed in UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (2010) but also to major languages, notably Ukrainian and Russian. The paper examines the sociolinguistic features of endangered languages and describes ecological vs. security conceptual metaphors associated with the idea of languages under threat.

"This article contributes to the nascent field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In particular, we are interested in how usage-based cognitive linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics may enrich each other. We first discuss some of the ways in which variationist insights have led cognitive linguists such as Gries (e.g. 2003) and Grondelaers et al. (e.g. 2008) to pay attention to language-external factors (such as medium, region, and register), thereby greatly enhancing the description and understanding of certain grammatical phenomena. The focus then shifts to cognitive linguistic work (by Hollmann and Siewierska 2007 and Clark and Trousdale 2009) which has implications for sociolinguistic theory. The two usage-based concepts that have proved especially relevant in this connection are frequency effects and schemas. The article explores and illustrates the role of these two factors in relation to linguistic variation by means of a new case study on definite article reduction (DAR) in Lancashire dialect, a variety spoken in the North West of England. A twofold conclusion is drawn: first, a symbiotic relation between cognitive and sociolinguistics seems possible, but second, in order for this relation to be truly mutually beneficial variationists should get involved in the Cognitive Sociolinguistic enterprise much more than is currently the case.
"

The present paper focuses on the sociolinguistic study of Pola de Siero spoken language. One of the main challenges of producing reliable data is to clearly define the methodology: on the basis of variationism, the central tenet of our approach is that the linguistic production involves not only linguistic and social factors, it also involves a language user’s establishing subsequently drawing on perceptive representations. This study follows the methodological line presented in Moreno Fernández (2012) with some adjustments, additional methods and variables, and purposeful attention to the linguistic situation of our speech community.

In  line with the "usage-based" view of language, cognitive linguistics began to shift from exploring the experientiality and universality of cognition to the study of semantic variation centered on cognitive and social interaction, ushering in the integration of cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics in research methods and theoretical frameworks, giving birth to cognitive sociolinguistics, which represents the new trends of linguistic research in the 21st century, and marks another major advance in the history of language science and even cognitive science.

This study addresses the media representations of Coronavirus pandemic in two of the leading Turkish newspapers: Sözcü and Sabah. Sözcü has the highest circulation in Turkish print media with an ideology critical of the government and Sabah is one of the best-selling dailies having a pure pro-government stance. The main objective of the study is to shed light on the discourses of these two newspapers on how government has managed the Coronavirus crisis. All of the columns of Sabah and Sözcü between March and September 2020 have been scanned and the articles having the selected key words in the title have been put under scrutiny. For each month, two articles have been analyzed in each newspaper and a total number of twenty-eight articles have been analyzed through employing Critical Discourse Analysis methodology of Van Dijk. Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach that studies the ways power abuse, dominance, and inequality are reproduced, and resisted by text and talk. Through using socio-cognitive approach of Van Dijk, this study aims to trace the following: how the government discourses regarding the pandemic are reproduced in Sabah; and what kind of discursive challenges have been made by Sözcü against the government discourses. It can be argued that, newspapers representing different ideologies based on the media ownership structures present a certain framework to the readers. They reproduce or challenge the government discourses through their own ideological perspectives.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics, institutionalized in the recent collective volume published by Kristiansen & Dirven (2008), is one of the most recent and stimulating extensions of Cognitive Linguistics which intends to investigate the socio-cognitive dimensions of linguistic variation through the use of consistent empirical methods. In terms of Cognitive Linguistics development, Cognitive Sociolinguistics allows to solve thematic and methodological tensions between the cognitive and social aspects of language and also between the cognitive perspective and the use of empirical and quantitative methods, and, therefore, contributes to an integrated socio-cognitive view of language. In this study, we present the reasons that make Cognitive Sociolinguistics necessary and even inevitable, the ways and methods used to integrate the social aspects of linguistic variation into the Cognitive Linguistics agenda and the research areas of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. As an application to the Portuguese language, we provide an overview of our investigation about convergence and divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese.

This study investigates developing linguistic prestige of the standard/local varieties in bidialectal kindergarteners whose linguistic environment has a high level of interference between two varieties of different social prestige. To date, little is known about linguistic preferences of kindergarteners who are exposed to a wide range of speech forms on a continuum of the standard (high-status) variety and a local (low-status) dialect. Particularly the emergence of metalinguistic awareness of the prestige of the varieties in a highly interfering bidialectal environment is understudied. 77 Hungarian 5-7-year-olds participated in a VGT-MGT quantitative experiment along with a brief qualitative data collection. A significant preference for the high-status variety and an emerging metalinguistic awareness of the different prestige of two varieties have been found in bidialectal children as early as age 6.

Current ‘Speaker Design’ approaches to sociolinguistic variation investigate how speakers may pro-actively deploy the linguistic resources (variation) at their disposal to achieve certain communicative effects. In this paper, Speaker Design is investigated in the case of Southern American English, a regional variety that can reportedly be used specifically by women to project personal charm. An interactional as well as a cognitive sociolinguistic account of this process are provided. Furthermore, empirical evidence for its workings is presented. This evidence is derived from a speaker evaluation experiment, whose results are outlined. It is argued that this experiment demonstrates that Southern American English elicits certain social associations in listeners such that women using it sound socially attractive. Female Southern speakers can tap into this effect to contextualize their utterances accordingly, giving rise to communicative effects such as ‘charming’ customers into buying products.

Usage-based approaches to language stress that a speaker’s mental grammar arises from and is shaped by language use and that the resulting mental representations include rich contextual linguistic and non-linguistic information. Yet, despite the fact that sociolinguistic research has pointed out the great importance of social and physical context factors as well as individual styles that speakers draw on to create their linguistic identities in authentic language use, usage-based Construction Grammar approaches have so far not paid enough attention to these phenomena. While the growing field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has already tried to incorporate a wide variety of sociolinguistic phenomena into their cognitive analyses, most Construction Grammar approaches usually only include sociolinguistic parameters (such as text type, register or dialect) as independent variables in their analyses. In this paper, I argue that such an approach ignores recent sociolinguist insights into the active stylization of individuals by dynamic linguistic acts of identity. In this paper, I will show the importance of these insights by focussing on English football chants. First, I will illustrate how football chants can be analysed as linguistic constructions that are constrained by complex social and physical context factors. In a next step, I will then argue that the complex social and physical context constraints as well as the potential to function as linguistic acts of identity are not only relevant for these types of constructions, but also need to be taken into account in usage-based Construction Grammar analysis in general.

In this paper, I propose that Probabilistic Grammar may benefit from incorporating theoretical insights from Cognitive (Socio)Linguistics. Particularly, I begin by introducing Cognitive Linguistics. Then, I propose a model of the domain-general cognitive constraints (markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming) that condition language (variation). Subsequently, three case studies are presented that test the predictions of this model on three distinct alternations in English and Spanish (variable agreement with existential haber, existential There be, and Spanish subject pronoun expression). For each case study, the predictions that follow from the model turn out to be empirically correct. I conclude that, with the support of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, Probabilistic Grammar may move beyond description towards explanation.

In this short write-up, I try to capture how patriarchal tendency in historicization end up depicting a one-sided, narrow, and fundamentally myopic view of social phenomenon (the Bengali Language rights' movement in then East Pakistan, in this context). I try to touch upon a less-talked-about area within the socio-linguistic disciplines, which is how our subjectivities shape and get shaped by our language. I try to link both the aforementioned issues in this essay.

This book is concerned with pidgin and creole languages. This statement might well give the impression that we know precisely what is meant by these terms. In fact they are the subject ofmuch debate. Creolists agree neither about the precise definition ofthe terms pidgin and creole, nor abour the status o[a number oflanguages that have been claimed to be pidgins or creoles, Mixed languages, introduced in chapter 4, have generally not been mentioned at all. To turn first to pidgin languages, it is generally agreed that in essence these represent speech-formswhich do nothave native speakers, and are therefore primarily used as a means of communication among pcople who do not share a common language. The degree of development and sophistication attained by such a pidgin depends on the qpe and intensiry of communicative interaction among the i$ users. Miihlhiusler (r986) makes three basic distinctions amongst speech-forms that crcolists have referred to as pidgins-(rather unstable) jargons, stable pidgins, and expanded pidgins (see further chapter 3). To turn to creole lalguages (or just creoles), one vital difference from pidgins is that pidgins do not have nativespeakers, while creoles do. This is not always an easydistinction to make, as one aspect of theworldwide increase in linguistic conformiry and the concomi-tanr reducdon in linguistic diversity, is that extended pidgins are beginning to acquire native speakers. This has happened for instance with Tok Pisin, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Sango (Central African Republic), to name but rhree cases. In panicular this has tended to occur in urban environments, where speakers from different ethnic groups have daily contactwith each other. The pidgin then becomes the town language. The children of mixcd marriages frequently grow up speaking the home language-the pidgin-as their native language. r.z Historical linguistics and the definition ofa creole A creole language can be defned as a language that has come into existencc at a point in time that can be established fairly precisely. Non-creole languages are assumed (often in thcabsence ofdetailed knowledge oftheir precise development) to haveemerged gradually.

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RESUMEN

El presente trabajo propone una reflexión conceptual sobre la subjetividad lingüística aplicada al contacto conflictivo producido por la migración. Valiéndose de los recientes aportes de la filosofía y de la neurobiología, se focaliza la atención en el componente valorativo de base neurológica (el llamado "somatic value system"), inherente a la cognición general y lingüística. Se establecerá hipotéticamente que este componente se pone en funcionamiento de modo artificial en la interrelación conflictiva entre inmigrantes/originarios. De carácter no innato sino adquirido en el contexto social, tal componente resulta determinante en el modo de percibir las variedades coexistentes en el mismo espacio, pertenezcan o no a la misma lengua y, por lo tanto, también en el modo de conocerlas y, obviamente, de utilizarlas. Se intentará demostrar finalmente que el sistema valorativo, en tanto manifestación de la subjetividad propia de la actividad cognoscitiva del hablante, resulta esencial tanto en el uso pragmático de ambos códigos como en la cognición de la estructura interna de la lengua ajena.

ABSTRACT

"The subjective dimension in language contact"

This paper proposes a conceptual reflection on linguistic subjectivity applied to conflictive linguistic contact as a result of migration. Departing from the recent contribution taken from both philosophy and neurobiology, our attention will be focused on the evaluative component (the so-called somatic value system), which is inherent to a general and linguistic cognition. It will be hypothesized that such a component re-emerges in a rather artificial way in the conflictive interrelationship between inmigrants and natives. This appraisal system, which is not innate but developed in social context, appears to be crucial in the spatial coexistence of linguistic varieties (whether they correspond or not to the same language). It is also determinant in the way linguistic varieties are perceived and, accordingly, learned and used. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the somatic value system, as a manifestation of the subjective dimension of languages, inherent to the speaker’s cognitive activity, is essential in the pragmatic use of both codes and in the cognition of inner linguistic structure of the target language as well.

Earlier work on existential agreement variation in British English and Caribbean Spanish has made a convincing case for the hypothesis that existential agreement variation is constrained by three domain-general cognitive constraints on language (production) that are assumed in Cognitive Linguistics: markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. A corollary of this analysis is that the same constraints should also be able to account for the behavior of other morphosyntactic alternations. To explore this hypothesis, I perform a case study of a well known, but notoriously hard to model alternation: subject pronoun expression in Cuban Spanish. I propose that the variation between overt and omitted tacit amounts to a competition between two abstract constructions: <Verb> and <SPP Verb>, which is constrained by the three domain-general cognitive constraints. The database consists of 7,849 conjugated verbs with human-reference subjects that were drawn from 24 sociolinguistic interviews with native speakers of Cuban Spanish residing in Havana, Cuba. The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression suggest that speakers prefer <SPP Verb> for conceptually more prominent subjects, for verb forms that are entrenched in this construction, and when they have just used or processed this construction. As this pattern coincides completely with the predictions that follow from markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming, the paper concludes that morphosyntactic variation is constrained by these domain-general cognitive constraints.

Throughout most of the 20th century, analytical and reductionist approaches have dominated in biological, social, and humanistic sciences, including linguistics and communication. We generally believed we could account for fundamental phenomena in invoking basic elemental units. Although the amount of knowledge generated was certainly impressive, we have also seen limitations of this approach. Discovering the sound formants of human languages, for example, has allowed us to know vital aspects of the ‘material’ plane of verbal codes, but it tells us little about significant aspects of their social functions. I firmly believe, therefore, that alongside a linguistics that looks ‘inward’ there should also be a linguistics that looks ‘outward’, or one even that is constructed ‘from the outside’, a linguistics that I refer to elsewhere as ‘holistic’ though it could be identified by a different name. My current vision is to promote simultaneously the perspective that goes from the part to the whole and that which goes from the whole to the parts, i.e., both from the top down and from the bottom up.
This goal is shared with other disciplines which recognize that many phenomena related to life are interwoven, self-organising, emergent and processual. Thus, we need to re-examine how we have conceived of reality, both the way we have looked at it and the images we have used to talk about it. Several approaches now grouped under the label of complexity have been elaborated towards this objective of finding new concepts and ways of thinking that better fit the complex organisation of facts and events.

En otro artículo (Claes, 2014b) establecimos que la pluralización de haber presentacional constituye un cambio desde abajo en el español de La Habana, Cuba. Más precisamente, apoyándonos en la gramática de construcciones, mostramos que la construcción presentacional pluralizada con haber (<SAdv haber Suj>) está reemplazando al formato <SAdv haber Obj >. La competición entre las variantes se ve constreñida por tres factores cognitivos generales: la marcadez de la codificación, la disuasión estadística y el priming estructural. En este artículo, primero, presentamos un modelo estadístico enmendado de estas restricciones. Después, usamos un árbol de inferencia condicional para investigar si, cómo, y en qué medida las tres restricciones cognitivas interactúan. Los resultados sugieren que la disuasión estadística es con mucho la restricción cognitiva más potente en esta variación. En particular, este factor incita al hablante a atenerse a los patrones de uso que ha observado, mientras que la marcadez de la codificación y el priming estructural hacen que extienda la construcción pluralizada a más y nuevas conceptualizaciones.

In this article, we investigate the pluralization of presentational haber (e.g. Habían fiestas. ‘There were parties.’) in the Spanish of Havana, Santo Domingo and San Juan. Drawing on Goldberg’s (1995. Constructions. Chicago: Chicago University Press.) Cognitive Construction Grammar, we claim that the phenomenon consists in a language change from below: the pluralized variant of the presentational haber construction (<AdvP haber Subject>) is replacing the impersonal variant (<AdvP haber Object>). Using a mixed-effect regression analysis, we show that speakers of the Caribbean dialects pluralize the verb in 41-46% of the cases. The linguistic factors that were investigated in this study (action-chain position of the noun’s referent, clause polarity, verb tense, comprehension-to-production priming and production-to-production priming) argue in favor of considering this variation an argument-structure alternation. The comparative sociolinguistic analyses reveal that these factors have the same effect and relative strength in the three varieties. For the three varieties, the results for gender and social class support that the phenomenon constitutes an advanced change from below.

Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept DRUNK, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, and hammered. For the concept SOBER, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent. While earlier variation studies have revealed that meaning-related concept characteristics correlate with the amount of lexical variation, these studies were limited in scope, being restricted to one semantic field and to one dialect area, that of the Limburgish dialects of Dutch (Geeraerts and Speelman 2010, Speelman and Geeraerts 2007, 2008). In this paper, we investigate whether the impact of concept characteristics, viz. vagueness, lack of salience and proneness to affect, is manifest in a similar way in other dialects and other semantic fields. In particular, by extending the scope of the earlier studies to other carefully selected semantic fields, we investigate the generalizability of the impact of concept characteristics to the lexicon as a whole. The quantitative approach that we employ to measure concept characteristics and lexical diversity methodologically advances the study of linguistic variation. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the further development of Cognitive Sociolinguistics by showcasing how meaning can be a source of lexical diversity.

This paper is based on a nascent project on Lancashire dialect grammar, which aims to describe the relevant features of this dialect and to engage with related theoretical and methodological debates. We show how corpora allow one to arrive at more precise descriptions of the data than was previously possible. But we also draw attention to the need for other methods, in particular modern elicitation tasks and attitude questionnaires
developed in perceptual dialectology. Combining these methods promises to provide more insight into both more general theoretical issues and the exact nature of the object of study, namely Lancashire dialect.