Augusto Soares da Silva Universidade Catolica, Braga, PT

The cognitive approach to pluricentric languages: What's really new?

There has been, during the last decade, a considerable productive increase of studies into language-internal Variation in Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts 2005; Kristiansen & Dirven 2008; Croft 2009; Geearerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman 2010; Kristiansen & Geearerts 2013). This new and burgeoning field of research, known as Cognitive Sociolinguistics, examines the social, cultural and conceptual meaningfulness of language-internal Variation, thus developing methods which are capable of unraveling the multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors. Pluricentricity is a special case of language-internal Variation, marked by questions of national identity and power. Therefore, Cognitive Sociolinguistics is well-prepared to deal with pluricentricity, fact that is well illustrated by the recent studies gathered in Soares da Silva (2014).

In this paper, our aim is to identify the theoretical, methodological and descriptive contributions of Cognitive Linguistics, as well as those of the emerging Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and attest to their relevance when it comes to the study of pluricentric languages. Theoretically, turning to given concepts in Cognitive Linguistics will improve the existing definitions and taxonomies of pluricentricity, and will increase our understanding of national and local varieties as socio-cognitive entities. More specifically: (i) prototype theory can help to understand that all languages are pluricentric to at least some degree; (ii) the notions of entrenchment and salience can increase our understanding of Variation and change in pluricentric languages and of the crucial role that is played by semantic, pragmatic and social meaning in promoting the success of dominant varieties and in competing between national varieties; (iii) the notions of conceptual perspectivization and cognitive reference point construction are useful to understand that national varieties not only reflect but also construe national identities and cultural cognitive differences; (iv) conceptual metaphors/metonymies and cultural models provide the key to identify the mental models and ideologies underlying attitudes to national varieties and to determine the influence of these cultural models on pluricentric Variation. Methodologically, advanced corpus-based and experimental multivariate techniques as well as concept-based sociolectometrical methods allow convergence and divergence between national variables and internal stratificational differences to be measured and correlated with all types of sociolinguistic variables. Descriptively, the cognitive perspective covers all types of meaning Variation and their correlations in pluricentric languages, and the language users' cognitive representation of pluricentric Variation. These theoretical, methodological and descriptive contributions will be illustrated taking as its base our recent studies on the pluricentricity of Portuguese, especially the process of divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese (Soares da Silva 2014).

References

Croft, William (2009). Towards a social cognitive linguistics. In Vyvyan Evans & Stephanie Pourcel (eds.), New directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam &Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 395-420.