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

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
far sooner than the unmarked construction exemplified by To whom did John
give the book?. The reason given is the massively greater frequency, or
‘salience’, of stranding in the data available to the learners. We would add,
however, that the salience of the construction in the target language may
actually be caused by its very absence in the learners’ L1s, and that it is the
resulting contrast effect coupled with high frequency that leads to its early
adoption.
Kerswill (1985) applies a definition of salience in terms of the
sociolinguistic sensitivity of a feature, and suggests a link with phonetic
discreteness. He proposes that, as the connected speech process of syllablecoda
l-vocalisation in south-eastern English varieties becomes increasingly
fossilised as the unmarked realisation (i.e., a part of canonical speech,
unrelated to factors such as speaking rate and attention), it becomes
‘sociolinguistically salient’. Thus, speakers tend to produce film as [fFGm] in
all circumstances. In Labov’s terms, this vocalised pronunciation becomes the
stigmatised variant of a linguistic ‘marker’ with the non-vocalised velarised
realisation [lH] as the other variant. Kerswill hypothesises that the salience is
connected to the fact that, as l-vocalisation becomes fossilised, it ceases to be
articulatorily and auditorily gradual, and takes on a phonetically distinctive
variant, a vocoid [G], which differs more sharply from the ‘clear’ [l] used in
pre-vocalic environments than did [lH]. It is, therefore, a moot point whether
the development of distinct variants follows from salience, or is the cause of
salience. Nolan, Kerswill and Wright (1991) find evidence for the
sociolinguistic salience of the vocoid in some speakers’ ability to avoid its
use, hypercorrectly replacing it with the clear [l] in situations where there is
social pressure to speak ‘correctly’ or when disambiguation is necessary.
Moreover, a perception experiment carried out by them showed that the
presence of l-vocalisation leads listeners to downgrade the social acceptability
of a speaker, again suggesting its sociolinguistic salience. Here, phonetic
distinctness goes hand-in-hand with the evident social evaluation of the
feature (its salience, as defined by these authors), revealed by speakers’ and
listeners’ behaviour with respect to it.
Using a rather more explicit definition of ‘salience’, Mufwene (1991)
uses this notion to explain the preference, in the pidgins and creoles he has
investigated, for analytic syntax and overt personal pronouns and other
grammatical markers even in cases where the lexifier languages do not have
these. Salience, for him, is used ‘strictly in perceptual terms for the
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