34.2787, Confs: Construction Grammar Meets Sociolinguistics

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2787. Fri Sep 22 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2787, Confs: Construction Grammar Meets Sociolinguistics

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Date: 22-Sep-2023
From: Lotte Sommerer [lotte.sommerer at anglistik.uni-freiburg.de]
Subject: Construction Grammar Meets Sociolinguistics


Construction Grammar meets Sociolinguistics

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Lotte Sommerer
Contact Email: lotte.sommerer at anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Meeting Description:

This workshop tries to bring together usage-based Construction Grammar
(CxG) and sociolinguistic research and its methodology. In general,
CxG stresses that language is an emergent complex adaptive system
(Diessel 2019) with a socio-cognitive basis and “must be understood in
its interaction between social and cognitive exigencies” (Schmid
2020:10; Harder 2010). Moreover, it is argued that linguistic
knowledge is best conceptualized in the form of constructions, i.e.
symbolic form-meaning pairings which directly map form (phonetic and
syntactic code) onto function (conventionalized semantic and
discourse-pragmatic knowledge) (Fillmore 1999; Croft 2001; Goldberg
2006). In more recent definitions it is explicitly stated that the
meaning side of constructions also includes social information; e.g.
knowledge about genre and style conventions, dialectal/sociolectal
information (Hoffmann 2022; Ungerer & Hartmann 2023).

We argue that this sociolinguistic component has not yet been
integrated sufficiently into current CxG research. Although the
connection between Sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics has
already been established in the form of ‘Cognitive Sociolinguistics’
(e.g. Geeraerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman 2010; Kristiansen et al 2022)
and although papers have been published on constructional issues (e.g.
Hollmann 2013, Kerz & Wiechmann 2015; Vieira & Wiedemer 2019; Morin,
Desagulier & Grieve 2020; Röthlisberger & Tagliamonte 2021; Soukup
2022; Szmrecsanyi & Engel 2022), we see room for a more thorough
investigation of how to integrate sociolinguistic aspects when a)
discussing constructional variation, spread and change b) sketching
network relations in the constructicon and c) postulating individual
constructional templates.

We situate sociolinguistic variation at various scales of social
organization. The traditional Labovian study of variation and change
is concerned with relationships among the linguistic systems of
different strata of a given speaker population, finding “orderly
heterogeneity” (Weinreich et al. 1968) along demographic lines such as
age, gender, and socio-economic status. More recent approaches have
placed greater emphasis on identity and social meaning in context
(Bucholtz & Hall 2008; Eckert 2012). A central theoretical concept in
this regard is indexicality and the organization of meaning potentials
in an “indexical field” (Eckert 2008). Finally, our understanding of
sociolinguistic variation also encompasses register, both as
conceptualized by Agha (2007) and Biber (1988).

This leads to the following research questions:

•       How, how much and what kind of sociolinguistic knowledge
should be integrated into constructional templates and network
sketches?
•       How does one cater for the fact that there are different
levels of conventionalization (regional, social, etc.)? How does this
map onto a network sketch of the constructicon of a particular
language?
•       How should CxG deal with sociophonetic knowledge/variation?
•       How are indexical presupposition and entailment to be
integrated into constructional representations?
•       How can the notion of an indexical field be incorporated into
constructional accounts, i.e. the idea that many linguistic forms come
with a range of meaning potentials, none of which is necessarily
actualized in any given instance of use?
•       How can register-sensitive language use be addressed
theoretically in variationist and constructional terms?
•       In what ways do the data (sociolinguistic interviews and
qualitative-ethnographic contextualization versus large corpora and
controlled experiments) and methods of statistical analysis
(mixed-effects regressions versus association measures) influence the
results to be gained in the two fields and is there potential for
mutual cross-fertilization at the methodological level? Where do
methodologies clash?

We welcome papers which explicitly relate their presented empirical
data and line of argumentation to the RQs above.




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