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Introduction1
The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the 'true' meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20-30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics as a distinct field began to emerge in the US in the late 1950s as a response to some weaknesses of the then-prevailing structuralist models in accounting for variability within the linguistic system. With the foundational paper of Weinreich et al. (1968) and pioneering studies carried out in the US (Labov, 1963, 1966) and Europe (Trudgill, 1974), sociolinguistics established itself as one of the most dynamically developing areas of linguistics, and has since revolutionised the way we think about language use. However, it has done so by investigating mainly phonological and to some extent morpho-syntactic variation. Lexis has been mainly studied descriptively and semantic variation has been rarely addressed within sociolinguistics. As a consequence, the past 40 years of sociolinguistic research has focused on exploring the meaning of variation (cf. Eckert, 2012), while leaving the variation of meaning aside.
A possible reason for this situation may be related to methodological issues in capturing the complexity of meaning. Sociolinguistic variationist techniques require rather defined segments of language that can be objectively derived and compared. Phonological and morpho-syntactic variables comply with this criterion relatively well. However, the fuzzy nature of meaning can be seen as a problem when the methodologies demand clear boundaries. Sociolinguists themselves...