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What is salience? / Cos'è la salienza?

As salience is a concept used in a variety of studies across different fields, its working definitions may vary greatly across linguistic subdomains, these include Sociolinguistics, Historical Linguistics, Lexicology and Lexicography, Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition among others (cf. Boswijk and Coler 2020).

In sociolinguistics, and language variation studies in general, salience is often recognized as one of the major factors involved in the identification of different types of varieties: the fundamental distinction proposed by Labov (2007) between indicator, marker and stereotype variables is, at its core, one of degrees of salience, positively correlating with explicit social evaluation of the variables and speakers’ awareness of them. Salient variables are then those units of a language which are primed for indexicality (Silverstein 2003), i.e., they are available for expressing social meanings, and may become involved in processes of language change such as accommodation and dialect convergence (Scaglione 2021). It is crucial, as Auer (2014) stresses, that this happens because a salient variable is perceived as such by the speakers, and this distinguishes salience from ‘markedness’. Sociolinguists as Rácz (2013) and Bardovi-Harlig (1987) propose a relationship between salience and markedness; this last concept being more system- rather than speaker-oriented (Deumert 2003).

In the field of historical linguistics, only in the last decades salience begins to be considered as one of the substantial factors in the linguistic change. For instance, during the 2014 ISLE conference in Zurich, salience has been recognised as a fundamental concept to be addressed in a diachronic analysis, besides frequency, analogy, ambiguity, acquisition-and-transmission (Hundt, Mollin and Pfenninger 2017). However, the debate on its nature and its operationalization within a language remains open. In a study on Irish English, Hickey (2000: 57) defines salience as “a reference to the degree to which speakers are aware of some linguistic feature”, suggesting that salience derives from language-internal factors, such as the appearance of features with high acoustic prominence, homophonic merger, or grammatical restructuring. More recently, Fanego’s (2012) study on motion expressions in the history of English demonstrates that the more lexical items are easily accessible, the more they become salient, consequently attracting and encoding new manner expressions.

When doing lexical analysis, a distinction needs to be made, according to Hanks (1990; 2013), between the cognitive and social salience of a word or word sense. In his view, cognitive salience is linked to ease of recall, while social salience (or statistical salience) to frequency of use. Therefore, while conventional everyday language is seen as unmemorable, but socially salient, unusual but memorable expressions are considered cognitively salient.

Another key phenomenon of lexicographical interest often described as salient are collocations, which Sinclair (1991, 170) defined as the “[frequent] occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in text”. The salience of a collocation, however, is not entirely based on its frequency (Ježek 2016, 204), but also depends on the proclivity of its components to form other collocations. The measures of word association that can be used to calculate the salience of a collocation include, i.a., Mutual Information (MI, Church and Hanks 1989) and logDice (Rychlý 2008), both available on the Sketch Engine platform (Kilgarriff et al. 2004).

The notion of salience is also employed in cognitive linguistics with different meanings. Cognitive salience refers to the (temporary) activation state of mental concepts into current working memory, while ontological salience refers to an (inherent) property of entities in the real world that are better qualified to attract our attention than others (Schmid 2007). In the latter sense, salience provides one of the possible explanations to the formation of prototypes (Taylor 1989): some entities may be considered prototypical for their category because they are perceptually more salient (Rosch 1973) or because their social significance is (Wierzbicka 1985). Cognitive salience comes into play not only in the activation of concepts during speech events and in the consequent lexical choices of a speaker, but also during the encoding of expressions profiling relational events and situations. Different degrees of salience, i.e. different distributions of attention across the entities involved in a profiled event, are reflected in different grammatical constructions (Talmy 2007; De Mulder 2007). These patterns of salience distribution have been described in terms of Trajectory/Landmark alignment (Langacker 2009) or Figure/Ground alignment (Schmid 2007). The terms Figure and Trajectory refer to the most salient entity in a given configuration, while the terms Ground and Landmark refer to the secondary element.

From the acquisitional perspective, the study of salience is intimately connected to the wide debate on the role of input (Carroll 2001; Valentini 2016 et al.). Indeed, the fact that the elements that are the most attention-grabbing also appear to be the most easily learned (Gass et al. 2018) suggests that salience contributes to the difficulty of a structure being learned (Housen & Simoens 2016), however much it itself represents "a composite, multicomponential, and multidimensional concept in search of a construct definition and valid operationalizations" (Ellis 2016). Glottodidactic approaches based on the manipulation of input draw precisely on the manipulation of salience (Della Putta 2016).

Finally, when doing pragmatic analysis, the concept of negotiation between speaker and hearer is pivotal (Grice 1975): in these terms, Kecskes (2006) claims that salience plays an important role during the production and mutual-comprehension process. According to Kecskes (2013), in fact, there are a collective salience and an emergent situational salience: the former is social and strictly linked to the creation of common ground between speaker and hearer, especially during a dialogue; the latter is perceptual and can be used by the speaker in order to signal a situationally meaningful or new part of a specific utterance, especially during a monologue (Gonzáles 2014), intending to catch people’s attention. Several linguistic devices, such as pragmatic markers, as well as intersubjective strategies (Hámori 2010; Gonzáles 2014), can be used to realize both types of salience: in this sense, cognitive and pragmatic aspects are intertwined.

References

Auer, Peter. 2014. Anmerkungen zum Salienzbegriff in der Soziolinguistik. Linguistik online 66, no. 4.

Bardovi-Harlig, K. 1987. “Markedness and salience in second-language acquisition”. Language Learning 37, no. 3: 385–407.

Boswijk, V. and M. Coler. 2020. "What is Salience?" Open Linguistics 6, no. 1: 713-722.

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Church, K., and P. Hanks 1989. “Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography”. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Della Putta, P. 2016. “The effects of textual enhancement on the acquisition of two nonparallel grammatical features by Spanish-speaking learners of Italian”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 38(2). 217–238.

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