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Book Reviews
* We are grateful to Professor María Jesús López-Bobo (University of Oviedo), a great mind and person; she passed away when we were writing this review.
Professor Francisco Moreno's research into Spanish language variation has played a leading role in the Hispanic countries. The list of his numerous articles and books is a testament to his significance. In this volume he provides a precise and articulate description of a cognitive approach to unsolved questions in sociolinguistics--old topics focused on from new perspectives.
In the foreword, Moreno has assembled a set of important commentaries on approaches to linguistics that have helped to highlight new research directions, and on the discoveries of a number of other disciplines (neuroscience, psychology, sociology, mathematics, physics, and IT) that served to promote new perspectives. He also reflects on the necessity of overcoming linguistic immanence and essentialism (Janicki 2006) to reach a multidimensional and integrated account in order to explain the relationships between linguistic production and the natural, social, and cultural components of communicative acts. From this point of view, language use (see Bybee 2010), social networks, which are understood as complex networks (see Solé 2009), and emergentist (see Johnson 2001) and dynamic systems proposals (see Thelen & Smith 1996) will be an important theoretical foundation.
In Moreno's opinion, the study of linguistic phenomena must be based on interaction in particular contexts, to overcome the duality of langue/parole and explanations based merely on the perception of communicative intentions, in order to account for linguistic negotiation, founded on the notion of cooperative behavior; the multiplicity of agents; the concomitance of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; the emergence of interactional, experiential, and cognitive patterns and their accumulation; and embodied linguistic use, all of which are highly relevant in embodied cognition (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch 1992; Clark 1997; Damasio 1999; Gallagher 2005). From this point of view, Professor Moreno notes that cognitive sociolinguistics is a meta-theory of social interaction compatible with different research methodologies and theories, building heavily on communicative accommodation/adaptation theory and on ecolinguistic, variationist, and usage-based models (Rosch & Lloyd 1978; Labov 1994, 2001, 2010; Bybee 2001, 2010; Fill & Mühlhäuser 2001; Mufwene 2001, 2008; Shepard, Giles, & Le Poire 2001;...