Cognitive Sociolinguistics

A union of Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics was bound to happen. Both proclaim a usage-based approach to language and aim to analyse actual language use in objective ways.

Whereas Sociolinguistics is by nature on the outlook for language in its variety, CL can no longer afford to ignore social variation in language as it manifests itself in the usage data. Nor can it fail to adopt an em...