Sources of variability relevant to the cognitive sociolinguist, and corpus- as well as psycholinguistic methods and notions to handle them

This paper is a plea for sociolinguistics to integrate both theoretical and methodological developments from cognitive linguistics and, even more importantly, psycholinguistics. More specifically, I argue that theoretical advances involving exemplar-based models and new methodological tools from psycholinguistics (regressions, in particular mixed-effects models) and corpus linguistics (in particular, more bottom-up studies) would help further sociolinguistics to a considerable degree. To exemplify at least some ways what such developments would look like, I then discuss three small case studies of instances of constructional variation in usage/corpus data, which showcase how contextual as well as cognitive-/psycholinguistic language-internal and sociolinguistic language-external factors interact and can be explored.