ABSTRACT
Conventional definitions of “sociolinguistics” refer to a conceptual spectrum so broad that its study could be approached from almost any perspective. In principle, the study of sociolinguistics requires consideration of realities external to the individual and beyond language itself, allowing the exclusion of elements considered to be part of what generativists call I-language as well as entities of a purely psychological nature (Chomsky 1995). This being the case, the concepts of “psycholinguistic processing” and “communicative interaction” could be con - sidered irreconcilable. The same would also be the case for “social organization” and “individual behavior” so that the terms “cognition,” “statement,” “inter action” or “socialization” could not be combined within a single sociolinguistic analysis. However, several recent linguistic contributions to our common knowledge concerned with the origin of language, brain function, language variation, learning processes and communicative exchanges have opened the door to a sociolinguistics where the individual is projected socially and where cognitive interaction is modeled using contextualized linguistic interaction. This requires recognition of the dynamic nature of language and its interpretation as a complex, adaptive system. This interpretation, which is founded on the concept of “language usage,” among others, has direct antecedents in the 1960s (Greenberg 1966), although it has taken a new turn in the twenty-first century (The Five Graces Group 2007; Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2009).
