The cognitive sociolinguistics of hella

Abstract

The present study examines how social meaning potentially shapes processes of conventionalization and entrenchment. It is argued here that there are (at least) two forces exerting varying degrees of pressure on a speaker’s mental representation of an utterance, which, in turn, potentially affects that utterance’s conventionalization (and vice versa). The first force arises from cognitive demands to ease the storage and processing of language, while the second force is based on social demands to conform with a given community of practice or possibly avoid being associated with it. Depending on their interaction, they can either amplify, inhibit, or only marginally affect the use of a given utterance. Targeting the regionally stratified intensifier/quantifier hella (e.g., this is hella cool, she walked hella miles) as a test case for this claim, geospatial acceptability ratings, quantitative data from COCA and NOW (US), and qualitative web data is used to trace its diffusion and usualization in contemporary American English. As a widely recognized Bay Area and Northern Californian shibboleth, speakers from that region not only routinely exploit the pattern across the syntactic spectrum but also use it to perform acts of identity, thereby facilitating further repetition. By contrast, in Southern California, a neighboring community of practice, the social meaning of hella is constructed in a way so as to rather resent its use. Elsewhere, despite some diffusion, the pattern remains rare and largely unconventional, due to both the waning degree of social indexicality and lack of frequent exposure, its cognitive predisposition towards routinization notwithstanding. These findings tentatively suggest that entrenched social meaning at the individual level and conventionalized social meaning at the community level warrant more systematic integration into usage-based models seeking to provide socio-cognitively adequate accounts of language structure and variation.