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Formalist approaches traditionally define word classes in distributional terms. By contrast, Cognitive Grammar advocates a semantic basis: nouns profile THINGS; verbs highlight PROCESSES. There is psycholinguistic support for the importance of semantics in lexical categorisation, but also for (languageparticular) distributional and phonological properties. This paper focuses on phonology, whose importance is further underlined by data from language change and typology. Following a review of the psycholinguistic, historical linguistic and typological evidence, a gap in the literature is filled, i.e. an experiment involving the production of nonce nouns and verbs is conducted, providing further converging evidence for phonology. I then show how this evidence, although not currently recognised in Cognitive Grammar, can be straightforwardly accommodated as phonological sub-schemas. These sub-schemas are probably more important than the super-schemas proposed in Cognitive Grammar (which may actually be non-existent, and anyway fail to yield clear predictions vis-à-vis empirical data). I conclude that in developing the model further, a higher degree of responsibility to all the available empirical data is called for.

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This article contributes to the nascent field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In particular, we are interested in how usage-based cognitive linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics may enrich each other. We first discuss some of the ways in which variationist insights have led cognitive linguists such as Gries (e.g. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: A study of particle placement, Continuum, 2003) and Grondelaers et al. (e.g. National variation in the use of er “there”. Regional and diachronic constraints on cognitive explanations, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008) to pay attention to language-external factors (such as medium, region, and register), thereby greatly enhancing the description and understanding of certain grammatical phenomena. The focus then shifts to cognitive linguistic work (by Hollmann and Siewierska, English Language and Linguistics 11: 407–424, 2007 and Clark and Trousdale, English Language and Linguistics 13: 33–55, 2009) which has implications for sociolinguistic theory. The two usage-based concepts that have proved especially relevant in this connection are frequency effects and schemas. The article explores and illustrates the role of these two factors in relation to linguistic variation by means of a new case study on definite article reduction (DAR) in Lancashire dialect, a variety spoken in the North West of England. A twofold conclusion is drawn: first, a symbiotic relation between cognitive and sociolinguistics seems possible, but second, in order for this relation to be truly mutually beneficial variationists should get involved in the Cognitive Sociolinguistic enterprise much more than is currently the case.

This paper is based on a nascent project on Lancashire dialect grammar, which aims to describe the relevant features of this dialect and to engage with related theoretical and methodological debates. We show how corpora allow one to arrive at more precise descriptions of the data than was previously possible. But we also draw attention to the need for other methods, in particular modern elicitation tasks and attitude questionnaires developed in perceptual dialectology. Combining these methods promises to provide more insight into both more general theoretical issues and the exact nature of the object of study, namely Lancashire dialect.