Modularity is a key concept in the debate between autonomous and non-autonomous conceptions of language (with cognitive linguistics clearly belonging to the latter). Empirical evidence regarding modularity primarily comes from psychological research, in the form of interactions between different modes of cognition in human cognitive processing, or in the form of double dissociations between cognitive faculties. But could we also test modularity when we follow a corpus-based method of linguistic analysis? In this talk professor Dirk Geeraerts of KU Leuven explores the consequences of usage-based cognitive sociolinguistics.