The main aim of this paper is to show that the notion of the ’self-serving bias’, well established in social psychological research, may have an impact on the way in which speakers verbalise certain experiences. I hypothesise that this perceptual bias will interact with other factors; specifically, gender stereotypes (as defined by psychologists and linguists) and modesty (as defined in linguistic pragmatics). I present corpus evidence for the relevance of the self-serving bias and the complex interplay with gender stereotypes and modesty, based on variation between three different causative constructions (CAUSE, X MAKE Y happen, and X BRING about Y) as well as the use of the adverbs cleverly and stupidly. In both cases, my analysis focuses on the cooccurrence with personal pronoun subjects — specifically, differences in terms of person (first vs third) and gender (masculine vs feminine). The most general conclusion I draw is that cognitive (socio-)linguists may be able to formulate interesting new research questions based on concepts drawn from (social) psychology but that constructs developed within linguistics remain highly relevant as well.

In this chapter, we will explore constructionist approaches to language variation and change in English. As part of this, we will see how classic sociolinguistic studies can be accounted for by a usage-based constructionist perspective. Then, we will look at how Construction Grammar offers a cognitive explanation of the evolution of new first and second language varieties of English around the world. Finally, you will learn how Construction Grammar approaches analyse diachronic linguistic change.