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

SALIENCE IN LANGUAGE CHANGE
unlikelihood of a marker to be omitted or missed even if it were reduced ...
salient markers may be stressed; their non-salient counterparts may not ... e.g.
the French T[ense] A[spect] inflections in their word-final position’
(1991:139). He goes on to refer to a semantic characteristic of salient items:
‘the role of salience in determining markedness values depends on whether
the relevant salient forms are clearly associated with specific meanings’
(ibid.). A further claim by Mufwene is important from the point of view of the
argument to be developed in this article. When discussing the origin of
particular pidgin and creole features, he states that while some could be taken
from different dialects, ‘these could have been selected because they were
favored by the contact situation even though they are marked options in the
lexifier’ (1991:127-8). This is an allusion to his central contention that the
exigencies of the contact situation are crucial in determining the outcome of
pidginisation and creolisation, and that salience plays a prominent part. We
shall argue, in a very similar vein, that sociolinguistic factors, including those
arising from contact situations, can outweigh structural linguistic factors in
influencing the adoption of a particular features.
Transparency in the form-meaning relationship, mentioned by
Mufwene, is also adduced by Chapman (1995) in her exploration of two types
of analogical change in Swiss German dialects, the analogical extension of
umlaut (the front-back vowel alternation found in German morphology) and
in the generalisation of vowel lengthening in nouns from the base form to
inflected and derived forms. She finds that in neither case is the productivity
of the process determined by whether a particular alternation is located in the
lexicon (as in derivation) or is a syntactic rule (for example, inflection) – the
prediction being that productivity would be greater for syntactic rules.
Instead, she claims that productivity is determined by ‘general semiotic and
cognitive principles’, which include ‘the transparency of the semantic relation
between base and derivative and the uniformity and transparency of the
formal means used to signal the semantic oppositions in question’ (1995:2).
These combine to form ‘perceptual salience, defined as the interaction of
semantic and formal transparency’ (3).
In all the definitions mentioned so far, we can detect an element of
circularity: by labelling a feature as ‘salient’, the authors claim to have
explained its patterning. However, the circularity is broken especially by
Chapman’s appeal to factors outside a particular theory-based analysis of the
linguistic system: the ‘general semiotic and cognitive principles’ referred to
above. Further support for a general notion of salience, with foundations
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