Dirk Geeraerts is professsor of linguistics at the University of Leuven, where he is the head of the research unit Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/gling/). His main research interests (and the main domain of investigation of the QLVL group) involve the overlapping fields of lexical semantics and lexicology, with a specific descriptive interest in social and historical variation, and a strong methodological commitment to corpus analysis.
His involvement with Cognitive Linguistics dates from the 1980s, when his PhD was one of the first in Europe to explore the possibilities of a prototype-theoretical model of categorization. As the founding editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics, he played an important role in the international expansion of Cognitive Linguistics. He was editor of the authoritative Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, and he is the managing editor of Mouton de Gruyter’s book series Cognitive Linguistics Research.
His publications include the following monographs (see http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/DGPublications.htm for details):
If Cognitive Sociolinguistics constitutes a meeting ground for cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics, we should be able to define why such a convergence is useful - for each of the two sides involved. In this talk, I will argue that a sociovariationist perspective is inevitable for cognitive linguistics, given the usage-based perspective of the latter. Analogously, I will argue that a rapprochement with cognitive linguistics is interesteing for sociolinguistics, given the curcial (but often hidden) importance of meaning in sociolinguistics. A convergence between both lines of research is not without methodological problems, however: starting from a comparison with physics, the talk will give an overview of the methodological challenges facing Cognitive Sociolinguistics.
