Special issue

Ondertitel:Constructionist approaches to individuality in language

For a long time, linguists more or less denied the existence of individual differences in grammatical knowledge; in recent years there has been an explosion of research on individual differences. This special issue addresses how these differences can be integrated into a cognitive-constructionist framework. The issue (i) responds to recent advances in methods and resources that allow for targeted and robust quantitative and experimental research on this underrepresented topic; (ii) ties in with growing interest in language as a complex adaptive system where micro- and macro-levels are inherently related (Beckner et al. 2009); (iii) redresses the problem that most usage-based research has failed to address this issue. Language only exists through its users. Users form a community, and try to talk the way others talk. As a conventionalized medium of communication, individuals’ representations of language are expected to overlap substantially. The tendency for users to conform, however, does not mean that their cognitive representations are identical. The universal grammar framework, which assumes that key aspects of grammar are innate, has adopted the perspective of an idealized language user (Chomsky 1965:3). This is not tenable for usage-based approaches, since (i) no-one’s input is identical (Dąbrowska 2012), and (ii) different people display different cognitive styles of processing information (Jonassen & Grabowski 2012). Yet the newly recognized diversity in competence has rarely been addressed by usage-based frameworks outside acquisition research. Despite claims of psychological plausibility (Tomasello 2009, Allen et al. 2012, Pulvermüller et al. 2013), cognitive construction grammar is no exception. This applies both to its methods, which tend to focus on the aggregate level, and its topics, which focus on shared similarities rather than differences. Most cognitive research on language has not fully embraced individual variation. This special issue aims to address this gap, by bringing together various subdisciplines that focus on different aspects of individual level differences. An overarching goal is to make headway in delineating a typology of individual behaviors by asking which behaviors are recurrent, which cognitive styles can be identified, under which conditions, with which motivations, and by investigating how the constrained range of behaviors collectively (re)shapes and is (re)shaped by the macro-level of the community. The idea of cognitive styles and constrained variation also fits in particularly well with the constructionist network model, where deviation from the common ground is expected to occur systematically, along lines of recurrent network associations.

Jaar van publicatie:2020

Trefwoorden:ME1 Book as editor or co-editor

Toegankelijkheid:Closed