Augusto Soares da Silva- Pluricentricity- Language Variation and Sociocognitive Dimensions
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Cognitive Linguistics2016;27(3):441–446 Book ReviewAugusto Soares da Silva(ed.),Pluricentricity:Language Variationand Sociocognitive Dimensions.Applications of Cognitive Linguistics24.Berlin: De Gruyter,2014,277pp.,ISBN:978-3-11-030347-6.Hardback and E-book€82.95/US$115.50/GBP62.49.Reviewed by Marie Møller Jensen,Department of Culture and Global Studies,Aalborg University,Denmark,E-mail:mariemj@cgs.aau.dkDOI10.1515/cog-2016-0049Pluricentricity describes a situation where a language has several standard ver-sions.This can be interpreted in very strict terms,as describing a situation where “the national identities of[a language’s]native speakers do not coincide”,or in very loose terms,given that“all languages are pluricentric insofar as dialectal variation naturally emerges and evolves around regional centres”(p.2).This edited volume features papers originally presented at the first confer-ence on Pluricentric Languages held in Braga,Portugal,in September2010.The chapters in the book all adopt a sociocognitive approach to language(more or less explicitly)and an impressive range of empirical methods is represented here,which underlines the strong emphasis on empirical work within this tradition.In addition to the introduction by Kristiansen on the topic of Pluricentricity, language-internal variation and Cognitive Linguistics,the book consists of nine chapters,equally split between three parts.Part I concerns theoretical perspec-tives,and features contributions by Auer on the topic of enregisterment in pluricentric German;Lüdi on feminization and multilanguaging in pluricentric French;and López-García,who approaches linguistic pluricentrism from a neu-rological perspective.The second section consists of three papers all taking a corpus-based approach to investigations of pluricentricity.The first chapter,by Ruette,Speelman and Geeraerts,compares methodologies for aggregating lex-ical variation;De Hertog,Heylen and Speelman focus on the method of Stable Lexical Marker Analysis(SLMA)for examining variation;and Soares da Silva takes a sociolectometrical approach to the pluricentricity of Portuguese.Part III features a collection of experimental and attitudinal studies.Schneider explores patterns of diffusion and the political and regional settings surrounding the pluricentricity of English;Speelman,Impe and Geeraerts investigate phonetic distance and mutual intelligibility between varieties of Dutch;and,finally, Norrby and Kretzenbacher focus on national variation in the terms of address used in Swedish and German.442Book ReviewIn Chapter1of the book,Gitte Kristiansen introduces the notion of plur-icentricity and considers the suitability of Cognitive Linguistics in providing a useful theoretical perspective.She lists seven questions on which the contribu-tors to the volume were asked to reflect(p.7).The questions cover a broad area, from national variation,culture and cognition,over linguistic systems and change,to the perception and evaluation of different national varieties.Any researcher looking for inspiration will certainly find it among these questions and in the responses which the other nine chapters in the book provide. Kristiansen states that the papers in this volume are“firmly based either on advanced statistical techniques[...]or based on data elicited in the form of questionnaire or survey-based research”(p.8)and,indeed,one of the strengths of this volume is its broad empirical scope.Finally,Kristiansen introduces the chapters in the volume in more detail,highlighting how they support each other and address the three different themes marking the sections of the volume.The list of references at the end of the first chapter provides a good starting point for anyone new to the field of socio-cognitive linguistics or Cognitive Linguistics in general.Chapter2by Peter Auer begins the section on theoretical perspectives and is entitled Enregistering pluricentric German.Auer considers the number of Teutonisms,Austriacisms and Helvetisms in German as well as their geographi-cal spread across Germany,Switzerland and Austria.In particular,Auer is interested in how the Austrian and Swiss standards become enregistered and he discusses several examples of this based on a variety of data types(dubbed TV clips;word atlases going back to the1970s;a cartoon from the1990s;and a transcription of a cabaret act).On the basis of this varied data pool,he is able to reach conclusions as to the type of features that demarcate the different varieties (they tend to be phonological and phonetic but do also include morphology, syntax and lexicon);the degree to which German is both regionally but also nationally pluricentric;and the differences in enregisterment that the national varieties of standard German have in Germany,Switzerland and Austria, respectively.In Chapter3,Georges Lüdi investigates Communicative and cognitive dimen-sions of pluricentric practices in French.This is an extensive chapter which deals with two different aspects of pluricentric practices in French.The first is femin-ization across different varieties of French and the second is multilanguaging(a term which describes forms of pluricentric practices in situations of language contact).Lüdi draws on a wide variety of examples,from French spoken in Europe and Canada to the use of French in Arabic speaking countries and hybrid languages in Canada(Chiac and Michif).The list of references is very extensive indeed and offers vast possibilities for digging deeper into some of the issuesBook Review443discussed.Unfortunately,the subsections in the paper are only numbered but not named which makes reading challenging at times as it can be difficult to keep track of all of the examples and analyses presented.However,for the patient reader,this paper offers a very comprehensive account of both feminiza-tion and multilanguaging and the discussion highlights that these two forces share a number of characteristics:they are dynamic and context sensitive;they are variational and dependent on socio-cognitive settings;and they are char-acteristic of specific speech communities.As such,they capture the nexus between language use and language change and thus can only be investigated within a linguistic framework which looks at context and the functionality of language.Chapter4byÁngel López-García introduces an interesting dimension to the socio-cognitive framework as it focuses on Linguistic pluricentrism as a neurolo-gical problem.The paper addresses intralinguistic and interlinguistic variation in phonology,syntax and lexicon from a neurological perspective.López-García argues that neural traces of these three aspects of language can be found in different areas of the brain.This,in turn,feeds into three models of language: the classic model(monocentric),the family resemblances model(pluricentric) and the superordinate-subordinate model(monopluricentric).These models or prototypes determine the sociolinguistic makeup of a community,López-García suggests.This chapter features a great number of figures(12,to be exact)to illustrate some of the more theoretically challenging models discussed and these are great help for the reader unfamiliar not only with the neurological aspects of language but also with the more theoretical aspects of Cognitive Linguistics.Chapter5presents the first of the corpus-based studies.It investigates Lexical variation in aggregate perspective and is by Tom Ruette,Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts.This paper takes a sociolectometric approach to the study of lexical variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch based on corpus data.It compares two methods for aggregating lexical variation which allows for a quantitative comparison of language varieties.The difference between the two methods lies in their treatment of the semantic relation between words. Perhaps not surprisingly,they find that the approach that incorporates seman-tic knowledge(the categorization approach which employs a cosine similarity metric)can detect the difference between the two varieties of Dutch,whereas an approach which ignores semantic relations(the profile-based approach based on a modified City-Block distance)fails to show any distinction.While the article is heavy on statistics and equations,it is very clear and easy to follow for the reader with only a basic understanding of mathematical terms. The City-Block distance method and the state-of-the-art categorization approach are introduced thoroughly before the actual case study is presented444Book Reviewand a variety of output types interpreted(Multidimensional Scaling and Scree Plots).Their overall conclusion with regards to the methods tested in the paper is that conceptual control based on conceptual categories is necessary in this type of study in order to reveal variation.However,as Ruette,Speelman and Geeraerts also state,the categories implemented in studies such as this will always be somewhat artificial as they are set by corpus makers and research-ers.This is a valuable reminder for all of us working with so-called objective methods such as statistics and quantitative data.Chapter6is also partly written by Dirk Speelman,this time in the company of Dirk De Hertog and Kris Heylen and they look at corpus-based identification of lexical variation through Stable Lexical Marker Analysis(SLMA).This is a corpus-based approach which focuses on finding variety-specific words in dif-ferent corpora based on graded markedness ratings.The method is described at length and features a combination of several statistical methods in order to address issues such as low sensitivity to low frequency words and topical bias. The paper also combines the quantitative output of the SLMA analysis of news-paper-based corpus data with qualitative analyses of variety-specific reference word lists in order to compare lexical markers in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch.This combination of methods also allows for further assessment of the SLMA.For example,it shows that the method does not deal with polysemous or homonymous words very well but that it is able to pick up on marked words which may be unknown(or unmarked)to language users.Chapter7by Augusto Soares da Silva is the most comprehensive in this volume and investigates the pluricentricity of Portuguese.It takes a sociolecto-metrical approach to divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese over the last60years.The study addresses onomasiological variation between denotational synonyms as well as language attitudes and is rooted in an analy-sis of corpus data(consisting of newspapers and internet chat in the areas of football and clothing)as well as attitude surveys.The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the pluricentricity of Portuguese and discusses romantic and rationalist models of the variation.The analyses of the data address both the uniformity between the two language varieties and also inter-nal uniformity(when speakers converge on their choice of lexical item to denote a certain concept)within each language variety.Soares da Silva considers the differences between lexical indicators of football and clothing terms,including the use of loanwords and the evolution of binational,endogenous and exogen-ous terms.The paper also investigates synchronic lexical stratification and constructional indicators as well as attitudinal indicators based on survey data.The study finds that the two national varieties of Portuguese diverge over time in the area of clothing terms but converge slightly with regard toBook Review445football terms.While this is not a methodological paper per se,it implements a range of statistical models in its complex range analyses which would prove valuable to any researcher interested in sociolectometry.Chapter8marks the third and final part of the book,which features experi-mental and attitudinal studies.This chapter,by Edgar W.Schneider,applies sociocognitive perspectives to the pluricentricity of English and investigates features such as global diffusion,regional attraction and local roots.The first part of the paper discusses pluricentricity with reference to the English language and outlines the two major reference varieties of English(British and American English).Then,Schneider introduces six emerging epicentres of global English: Australian English,New Zealand English,Indian English,Singaporean English, South African English,and Jamaican English.Based on the seven questions outlined in the introductory chapter by Kristiansen,Schneider designed a ques-tionnaire consisting of11specific,qualitative and open-ended questions.The results reported in this paper are based on21responses from“linguists and expert observers”(p.191)residing or specialising in the different global Englishes mentioned above.The results make for interesting reading and clearly show not only how cognitive sociolinguistics can help us examine the area of World Englishes in more depth but also highlights areas that particularly war-rant future research.Chapter9is another co-authored article featuring Speelman and Geeraerts who are joined by Leen Impe in their investigation of Phonetic distance and intelligibility in Dutch.Their paper investigates the extent to which objective phonetic distances between ten varieties of Dutch(Belgian and Netherlandic Standard Dutch and four regional varieties from either country)influence mutual intelligibility.This was done via a computer-controlled intelligibility test and the implementation of the Levenshtein distance algorithm.The intellig-ibility test consisted of a lexical decision task and an identification task.Test subjects were presented with a range of existing and non-existing words all recorded by male radio presenters(speakers of the local varieties under study). The results were analysed on the basis of accuracy and speed of responses. Speelman et al.find that Dutch indeed behaves like a pluricentric language but that there are national differences between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch.The phonetic distances are shown to be greater between the Belgian Standard Dutch and the four tested Belgian non-standard varieties compared to similar distances in the five Netherlandic Dutch varieties.In addition,the more recent standardi-sation of Belgian Dutch is found to be reflected in the fact that Flemish speakers are also better at identifying variation compared to Netherlandic participants. Finally,Speelman et al.argue that the results of this study also provide evidence for the pluricentric nature of Dutch from a perceptual perspective.446Book ReviewThe tenth and final chapter is by Catrin Noorby and Heinz L.Kretzenbacher who investigate variation in Swedish and German terms of address.This paper thus focuses on differences in,and attitudes to,a pragmatic aspect of pluri-centric language use.Their paper is based on focus group meetings and ques-tionnaire-based network interviews conducted in Finland and Sweden(for Swedish)and Germany and Austria(for German).Terms of address are mea-sured on several planes although the main governing principle is that of social distance.Factors considered include:the scale of grammatical resources,iden-tity factors(age,familiarity,accommodation)and context.The authors found differences in use of terms of address(T/V distinction)in the different varieties of both Swedish and German.In addition,they also found that speakers’knowl-edge of‘the other’was largely informed by stereotypes.With regard to speakers of the‘minority variety’(i.e.,Finland Swedish and Austrian German),the study found that these speakers were the most sensitive to differences between vari-eties and also more knowledgeable about the patterns of the‘majority variety’.In sum,the volume covers a wide range of methodological approaches, languages,linguistic situations and developments.As such,it offers plenty of inspiration for researchers who are interested in either pluricentricity or the socio-cognitive approach.The majority of the articles work well and present interesting and novel results and test and improve well-known methods.Some, however,also seem more eclectic in their construction,with some subtopics either less clearly developed or simply better suited as separate papers.Some articles would also benefit from further proofreading.Due to its vast topic area and the wide reach of the articles,it is difficult to see the book as an expression of a whole.The issue of pluricentrism seems to be addressed in different ways in the different articles,sometimes even with only a farfetched connection.Overall,though,this book offers inspiration on a broad range of topics(across empirical methods,approaches to language variation, and different language varieties)from some of the leading researchers within the field of socio-cognitive linguistics.Finally,the list of research questions introduced by Kristiansen in Chapter1 (and further developed by Schneider in Chapter8)outline several areas for further study.Some were addressed by chapters in this volume(more or less explicitly)but some remain unanswered.It seems only too obvious to suggest this list as a point of departure for any researcher with an interest in the socio-cognitive framework.。
