Sociolinguistics
Bahman Zandi; Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei; Fatemeh Yousefi Rad
Abstract
Social linguistics adopted a synchronic framework and turned onomastics from an archaist science to a modern one dealing with contemporary society. However, it is impossible to ignore the role names play in shaping individuals’ cognitive structures. Thus, cognitive linguistics also showed an interest ...
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Social linguistics adopted a synchronic framework and turned onomastics from an archaist science to a modern one dealing with contemporary society. However, it is impossible to ignore the role names play in shaping individuals’ cognitive structures. Thus, cognitive linguistics also showed an interest in this subject because “Names” are multifaceted linguistic elements. Similar to traditional and philosophical studies, social onomastics mostly deal with proper names, but cognitive linguistics, especially studies of Geeraerts et al., address common names. Labov (1972) sees urban social linguistics as the “science of field studies”; this view can be safely applied to onomastic studies, especially to the approach that addresses onomastics from a socio-cognitive perspective with an emphasis on use and context. This article aims to provide roadmap for onomastics studies applying documentary research method. The authors, after a quick philosophical and diachronic review of literature, examine contemporary onomastics studies from a sociocognitive perspective. The conclusion of their observation and studies shows that the scope of onomastic research has expanded, word-formation (lexical generation) processes draw less attention. Instead, lexical structure and different quantitative approaches, which study the strength of onomastic processes, are receiving more attention by the day.
Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei; Fatemeh Yousefi Rad
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /jigar/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The main objective is to show that cognitive sociolinguistic approach is more adequate to explain lexical polysemy in comparison to cognitive linguistics. In cognitive sociolinguistics, ...
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This study aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /jigar/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The main objective is to show that cognitive sociolinguistic approach is more adequate to explain lexical polysemy in comparison to cognitive linguistics. In cognitive sociolinguistics, it is believed that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of a language. Rather, social variables like age and gender of speakers affect the way they perceive different meanings of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with Robinson (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014), investigates the effects of two social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each meaning of the polysemous word /jigar/. The data are gathered through library research (e.g., using Persian dictionaries), interviews, and questionnaires. The research method employed is hybrid, i.e. qualitative and quantitative. The data are gathered from 200 subjects, 100 male and 100 females, in four different age groups in Tehran. The results indicated that cognitive sociolinguistics is indeed more adequate in giving more exact explanations concerning meaning variation in polysemous words and the effect of social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each sense. In other words, the results show that different senses of the polysemous words do not suggest the same distribution among different speakers, both male and female, belonging to different age groups, and are not accidental but explainable in terms of age and gender of the speakers.
Sociolinguistics
Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam; Fatemeh Yousefi Rad; Vida Shaghaghi; Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei
Abstract
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 ...
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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.
