Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Book excerpt: The book brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimenntal methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. In the book, methods are sought that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors. 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.