Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
some venerability, dating at least back to Schirmunski’s (1930) notion of
Auffälligkeit, which he used to try to explain the difference between
‘“primary” dialect features ([salient features] which are susceptible to change
or loss) and “secondary” dialect features ([less salient features which are]
relatively resistant)’ (Hinskens 1996:12). As our review in the next section
shows, a salience-type concept has been adduced as an independent factor in a
number of branches of linguistics; however, in the context of recent
dialectology, it is in Trudgill (1986:11, 37) that we find the most careful
elaboration of ‘salience’ and its most explicit application to language change.
We take the view that salience offers sufficient insights for it to be a potential
explanatory factor, while stressing that, without careful argumentation on the
linguist’s part, the concept all too easily lapses into circularity and mere
labelling.
Trudgill discusses salience in the context of dialect contact. Far from
being a limited ‘special case’ of language contact, dialect contact is a
phenomenon typologically different from language contact because it does
not involve speakers learning a new language, either wholly (giving rise to
varying degrees of bilingualism) or in a restricted sense (typically resulting in
lexical borrowing, but without any other changes). Instead, items can be
mixed apparently at will and with minimal loss of intelligibility, without
violating Poplack’s ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack 1980; Kerswill
1994:17; Kerswill forthcoming). Moreover, it can be argued that dialect
contact in fact lies at the heart of any language change that does not primarily
involve contact between mutually unintelligible and structurally different
varieties. If we accept, with J. Milroy (1992), that innovations are spread
(though not originated) through contact between individual speakers, then the
centrality of dialect contact becomes clear: a speaker adopts, or rejects, a
linguistic form (which may be an innovation) used by another speaker with
whom he or she is in contact. The fact that dialects in contact are
typologically very close means that innovations are free to spread within the
large number of linguistic units which are structurally equivalent, especially
phonemes and lexical items, following either a Neogrammarian route or else
by lexical diffusion (McMahon 1994:58).
Contact cannot, however, explain the reason why a particular change
happened at the particular time and place it did, and not at some other time or
place when the linguistic and social conditions were similar. As Croft points
out: ‘[T]he source of new variants is often external; but this can be argued to
be propagation across dialect (or language) boundaries. But the question
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