Construction Grammar meets Sociolinguistics

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Lotte Sommerer
Contact Email: [email protected]

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.

The workshop (approx. 12-13 papers) will start with an introduction by the organizers and will be concluded with a final discussion. For our workshop proposal, we are soliciting abstracts of 300 words (excluding references). Abstracts should be emailed to [email protected] and [email protected] by the 13th of November 2023. Acceptance will be based on the quality and fit of the abstracts. After the workshop proposal has been accepted by the SLE, all the preliminary workshop participants must submit their extended abstracts again to EasyChair before 15 January 2024. For further questions and a more detailed workshop description including all references see the SLE homepage (https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024) or contact one of us.