26.1176, Review: Cog Sci; Ling Theories; Pragmatics; Socioling: Pütz, Reif, Robinson (2014)

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Subject: 26.1176, Review: Cog Sci; Ling Theories; Pragmatics; Socioling: Pütz, Reif, Robinson (2014)

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Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 17:01:58
From: Kim Jensen [kim at cgs.aau.dk]
Subject: Cognitive Sociolinguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2658.html

EDITOR: Martin  Pütz
EDITOR: Justyna A. Robinson
EDITOR: Monika  Reif
TITLE: Cognitive Sociolinguistics
SUBTITLE: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 59
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Kim Ebensgaard Jensen, Aalborg University

Review's Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture

SUMMARY

Cognitive sociolinguistics is an emerging field of linguistic research which
combines cognitive-linguistic and sociolinguistic insights. The cornerstone
publications in cognitive sociolinguistics appear to be these three
collections of papers: Kristiansen and Dirven (2008), Geeraerts et al. (2010),
and “Journal of Pragmatics” 52 (a special issue on contexts of use in
cognitive sociolinguistics). The volume under review continues this trend, as
“Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and Cultural Variation in Cognition and
Language Use” (henceforth CSL) collects seven papers (plus the editors'
introduction) presented at the LAUD 34 in 2010, and previously published in
“Review of Cognitive Linguistics” issue 10, volume 2.

In the introduction, entitled “The emergence of Cognitive Sociolinguistics: An
introduction,” the editors provide an overview of the current scope of
cognitive sociolinguistics, pointing to usage-based linguistics,
language-internal variation, meaning variation, prototype categorization,
culture, and ideology as areas where there is convergence between cognitive
linguistics and sociolinguistics. The editors point out that “it must be
stated at the outset that up until the present time, it is mainly established
cognitive linguists who have expressed the need to include a social and
cultural perspective, i.e. to constitute a Cognitive Sociolinguistics” (p. 3).
Gries (2013) makes a similar observation, arguing that sociolinguists should
consider insights and methodologies from contemporary cognitive linguistics.
It should be mentioned, however, that some researchers who primarily align
themselves with sociolinguistics have taken steps towards integrating insights
from cognitive science (e.g. Jensen 2013). As is customary of anthologies, the
introduction also provides a brief summary and discussion of the chapters in
CSL.

The introduction is followed by a chapter by William Labov, in which he
discusses “What is to be learned: The community as the focus of social
cognition”. Labov argues for an outward leaning perspective on acquisition in
which the individual is secondary and the community is primary, understood
such that individuals' language acquisition is adjusted to the community. In
fact, Labov argues that the individual should be left out of the equation
altogether when it comes to linguistic analysis and description. Labov draws
on a range of variationist studies of acquisition to support this, including
Payne (1976), Sankoff et al. (2001), Guy (1980), and Lieberson (2000). All of
the studies that Labov discusses in his chapter suggest that speakers'
acquisition targets the variety spoken in the community and not the variety
spoken by their parents, that there is a tendency to acquire new patterns in a
speech community, and that language change correlates with social values.
Ultimately, all of this, Labov argues, reflects an outbound orientation in
language acquisition and social cognition. Labov also suggests that
information on sociolinguistic variables are stored in a separate cognitive
module that he calls a sociolinguistic monitor.

Peter Harder's contribution “Variation, structure and norms” provides a
theoretical discussion of normativity as well as variation and structure in
sociolinguistics and usage-based cognitive linguistics. Harder argues for a
reevaluation of the positivist distinction between normative statements and
descriptive statements, suggesting that the language system should be seen as
a community's normative feature. Norms, he argues, may be explicit (and
conscious) or implicit (and un- or subconscious). Harder's discussion takes
the perspective of language evolution (see also Croft 2000) and also offers a
critique of what he calls 'the anti-normative stance' of the post-'68 and
post-modernist movements in the humanities and social sciences. Harder points
out that structuralism, social constructionism, and cognitivism, despite the
very valuable contributions they have made, have developed divides that are
not really necessary. His argument is that the evolutionary approach that he
himself (Harder 2010) and others (e.g. Croft 2000) advocate places the mind in
social space, enabling us to eliminate the above-mentioned divides and thus
reintegrate cognitivism, structuralism, and social constructivism into one
framework.

Taking the perspective of cognitive anthropology, David B. Kronenfeld's
chapter “Flexibility and change in distributed cognitive systems: A view from
cognitive anthropology” deals with culture as a set of collective cognitive
structures. Kronenfeld's chapter is a discussion revolving around three issues
– namely, social factors in theories of language, cultural variation of
cultural models, and generalizations from marking theory in linguistics.
Kronenfeld argues that phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic knowledge,
among others, are all collective cognitive structures distributed among the
members of community in a manner that is captured by Sharifan's (2008) term
'heterogeneous distribution'. A quite broad discussion, this chapter touches
upon the semantics-pragmatics distinction, cognitive flexibility and prototype
extension, and social group overlaps among other things. The entire discussion
relates to Kronenfeld's overall theory of culture, presented in a number of
his more recent writings.

Kronenfeld's contribution is followed by another chapter in which the notion
of the cultural models figures – namely, Klaus P. Schneider's “Pragmatic
variation and cultural models.” Schneider reports on a study of pragmatic
variation in three national varieties of English – namely, English English,
Irish English, and American English. More specifically, Schneider has
investigated pragmatic variation in small talk, making use of multiple choice
tasks, discourse completion tasks, and dialog production tasks. The present
chapter focuses on a dialog production task in which respondents were asked to
construct a conversation between two strangers at a party. The task was
designed to elicit phatic exchanges. Using this method, Schneider finds a
number of patterns of variation and similarity among the three varieties of
English under investigation. Schneider suggests that this may be indicative of
different underlying cultural models of small talk interaction at parties.

The next chapter is Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen's “Cognitive
sociolinguistics in L2-variety dictionaries of English”. Taking the combined
perspective of lexicography and World Englishes, this chapter argues for
usage-based approaches to dictionaries and explores the value of conceptual
and cultural information in English dictionaries. Drawing on entries in the
“Dictionary of West African English” and “A Dictionary of Hong Kong English,”
Wolf and Polzenhagen go through a number of idiomatic expressions from
L2-varieties of English and illustrate how cultural information can actually
make explicable the often covert cultural and cognitive underpinnings of such
idioms. Thus, this chapter quite explicitly argues for the adoption of
cognitive-sociolinguistic principles in the field of lexicography.

In their contribution A. Seza Doğruöz and Stefan Th. Gries investigate the
“Spread of on-going changes in an immigrant language: Turkish in the
Netherlands”. This chapter reports on a study of constructional variation
across Turkish in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) and Turkish in Turkey
(Tr-Turkish), focusing on the spread of unconventional constructions in
NL-Turkish. Considering the sociolinguistic background of NL-Turkish, the
authors describe two important social-contextual factors of NL-Turkish, both
of which are crucial in making NL-Turkish a strong immigrant language:
NL-Turkish speaker's continuous contact with Turkey and the group dynamics
within the NL-Turkish speech community. The study itself is based on
statistical analysis of acceptability judgments and observation of
constructional behavior in an NL-Turkish corpus, and Doğruöz and Gries find
that NL-Turkish speakers use unconventional constructions but prefer
conventional ones from Tr-Turkish in their acceptability judgments. A second
finding is that low frequency stimuli receive higher acceptability ratings in
both speakers of both NL- and Tr-Turkish. In explaining these findings,
Doğruöz and Gries draw on a number of sociolinguistic factors, such as
language contact and community structure.

The last chapter is Andrew J. Pantos' “Defining the cognitive mechanisms
underlying reactions to foreign accented speech: An experimental approach”. In
this chapter Pantos reports on an experimental study of language attitudes
towards foreign accented speech in English in which participants are exposed
to a US-accented speaker of English and a Korean-accented speaker of English.
Breaking away from the traditional focus on explicit attitudes, this study
looks to the domain of implicit social cognition, and Pantos' aim is to
measure whether there is a divergence between implicit and explicit attitudes
in the same listener towards that same speaker. Using the
associative-propositional evaluation model, Pantos finds that the participants
in his experiment implicitly favor the US-accented speaker over the
Korean-accented speaker, while they explicitly favor the Korean-accented
speaker. Pantos suggests that the positive explicit attitudes toward the
Korean-accented speaker might be a reflection of hypercorrection of the
negative, and socially undesirable, negative attitude towards the
Korean-accented speaker. Pantos also suggests the implicit and explicit
language attitudes may be tied with with different mental processes.

EVALUATION

On the whole, like Kristiansen and Dirven (2008) and Geeraerts et al. (2010),
as well as “Journal of Pragmatics”, 52, CSL contains exciting contributions
that address quite different aspects of the intersection between language,
cognition, culture, and society. The odd man out is perhaps Labov's
contribution, whose main suggestions are that sociolinguistic information is
stored and processed in a separate cognitive system in speakers and that
language is acquired such that the speech community comes before the
individual. Since there are some discrepancies between Labov's perspective and
that of standard cognitive linguistics, I think that his contribution is worth
discussing here. As for the first suggestion, there is conflict between
Labov's and a cognitive linguist's takes on cognition generally. The
incompatibility between standard cognitive linguistics and the concept of a
separate sociolinguistic monitor lies in cognitive linguistics not allowing a
completely separate cognitive system for social cognition. As Gries (2013: 7)
points out in a comment on the abstract of Labov's talk at LAUD 34, the
community-first view on language acquisition is at odds with exemplar theory
and usage-based language modeling, which have become standard in contemporary
cognitive linguistics and are considered defining features of cognitive
sociolinguistics as well, as Wolf and Polzenhagen point out in their chapter.
Exemplar theory, as Gries (2013: 7) stresses, is irreconcilable with the
notion of separate storage and processing of sociolinguistic information.
Labov's contribution may go against the cognitive-sociolinguistic stream, as
it were, but it is nonetheless an incredibly important inclusion into the
volume for at least three reasons. Firstly, Labov is one of the most important
figures in sociolinguistics, so his take on cognition in sociolinguistics
should, of course, appear in a volume on cognition and sociolinguistics.
Secondly, since the volume deals with cognition and sociolinguistics, it makes
sense to include other perspectives than just the cognitive-linguistic one
which otherwise seems prevalent in the emerging field of cognitive
sociolinguistics; in fact, the worst thing that any scientific community can
do is to simply ignore alternative theories to the ones they have adopted as
canonical. Therefore, I applaud the editors of CSL for including his chapter.
Thirdly, Labov's chapter contains a wealth of truly interesting data and
references to fascinating sociolinguistic studies and is thus full of
information in actual language variation in English that anyone with an
interest in social aspects of language variation may benefit from.

Although there is a wealth of data in Labov's contribution, the data primarily
serve to support his theory, and his contribution is primarily a theoretical
one. This also applies to Harder and Kronenfeld's chapters. Harder does refer
to numerous empirical studies, and Kronenfeld mentions a study of Old and
Middle English nomenclature of watercourses and a study of Fanti kinship
terms, but together the three first contributions are primarily
theory-oriented. While these chapters are immensely important, the consequence
is that the first 105 pages of CSL are theoretically very heavy, and it is not
until Schneider's chapter on pragmatic variation that methodological issues
and more complex empirical matters enter the picture. Thus, I think that
readers who are primarily interested in empirical aspects of cognitive
sociolinguistics are likely to gravitate towards the last four chapters, while
those who are more interested in theoretical issues are likely to be attracted
to Labov, Harder, and Kronenfeld's chapters. To their credit, the editors
clearly specify which chapters are empirically oriented in their introduction,
but I do think that perhaps the volume could have been organized into two
parts entitled 'theoretical issues' and 'empirical studies' (or something
along those lines). I definitely think that such a move would have been very
helpful to the readers.

Given broadness of the issues addressed in this volume, the target reader
group is quite diverse. This means that the volume as a whole should appeal to
a number of very different readers with an interest in language, cognition,
and society. However, as hinted at in connection with the theoretically versus
the empirically oriented chapters, another consequence is that there is
probably not one reader to whom all seven chapters are of relevance, and
readers are bound to ignore chapters irrelevant to them and only focus on
relevant chapters. Schneider's chapter might even be a useful case study
reading in courses in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics as
well as methods in linguistic research, as Schneider provides a critical
overview of his own method. Doğruöz and Gries' chapter would also be a useful
case study reading in the same types of courses. Finally, Labov's chapter
would be suitable as an overview reading in a course in sociolinguistics and
as an other-point-of-view reading in a course in cognitive sociolinguistics.

Along with Kristiansen and Dirven (2008), Geeraerts et al. (2010) and “Journal
of Pragmatics”, 52, CSL serves as a focal point in the literature within the
emerging field of cognitive sociolinguistics. All four volumes contain several
interesting, and some groundbreaking, papers on cognition, language, culture,
and society, and they complement each other to the point that CSL can easily
be considered the fourth cornerstone in the literature on cognitive
sociolinguistics. The eight chapters in CSL (including the introduction by the
editors) are fascinating and informative. The three theoretically oriented
chapters are enlightening and thought-provoking, while the empirically
oriented ones are inspiring and present some truly interesting, and
occasionally baffling, data and analyses. “Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social
and Cultural Variation in Cognition and Language Use” should be a fascinating
read for both cognitive linguists and sociolinguists along with anyone else
who might be interested in the language-cognition-culture-society
intersection.

REFERENCES

Croft, W. (2000). Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach.
Harlow: Longman.

Geeraerts, D., G. Kristiansen, Y. Peirsman, eds. (2010). Advances in Cognitive
Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gries, S. Th. (2013). Sources of variability relevant to the cognitive
sociolinguist, and corpus- as well as psycholinguistic methods and notions to
handle them. Journal of Pragmatics 52: 5-16.

Guy, G. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: the case of final
stop deletion. In W. Labov, ed. Locating Language in Time and Space. New York:
Academic Press.

Harder, P. (2010). Meaning in Mind and Society: A Functional Contribution to
the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Jensen, M. M. (2013). Salience in language change: a socio-cognitive study of
Tyneside English. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Northumbria PhD thesis.

Kristiansen G. and R. Dirven, eds. (2008), Cognitive Sociolinguistics:
Language Variation, Cultural Models, Social Systems. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.

Lieberson, S. (2000). A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions and Culture
Change. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Payne, A. (1976). The Acquisition of the Phonological System of a Second
Dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis.

Sankoff, G., H. Blondeau and A. Charity.(2001). Individual roles in a
real-time change: Montreal (r>R) 1947-1995. Etudes and Travaux 4: 141-158.

Sharifan, F. (2008). Distributed, emergent cultural cognition,
conceptualisation, and language. In R.M Frank, R. Dirven, T. Ziemke and E.
Bernárdez, eds. Body, Language, and Mind: Sociocultural Situatedness. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter. 109-136.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kim Ebensgaard Jensen is an associate professor of English at Aalborg
University where he teaches courses in English linguistics and discourse
analysis. His research interests include cognitive linguistics, construction
grammar, and corpus linguistics.





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