Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Introducing a New Approach to Meaning and Linguistic Variations

This paper introduces the main tenets of the new approach to cognitive sociolinguistics and suggests that by incorporating the insights of sociolinguistics with those of cognitive linguistics, this new approach can provide a new and fruitful perspective to the study of language. The two properties of this new approach, i.e., its usage-based character and its emphasis on social variations of language, make it heart throbbing and most optimal for the study of language. After introducing the main tenets of cognitive sociolinguistics, this paper shows that these two underlying properties, the usage-based character and the emphasis on social variations, are the communication loop between the cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics approaches. Such an approach should accept that the only acceptable way to study the systematic variation of language that encompasses the social dimension of the phenomenon is necessarily empirical. In other words, adopting social approach entails taking an empirical method.