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

SALIENCE IN LANGUAGE CHANGE
syntactic features. She argues (1996:6) that interrogative and negative clauses
are ‘inherently interactive syntactic environments’, and she cites examples of
the greater frequency of non-standard forms in these contexts. Similarly, she
argues that prominence is related to foregrounding in discourse, and that this
leads to the use of non-standard features there, too. The reason, in her view,
for the salience of both negative/interrogative clauses and foregrounded
material lies in the fact that ‘non-standard language is an essentially oral form
of language’, and therefore, ‘those environments that favour the occurrence of
nonstandard variants will be those that are particularly important in
spontaneous oral communication (1996:5).
We can summarise the claims of the studies just mentioned as follows:
• Salient non-standard features may be hypercorrectly avoided
• There may be negative social evaluation of speakers using a salient nonstandard
feature
• High frequency items are salient
• Grammatical markers which cannot be phonetically reduced, such as noncliticised
pronouns, are salient, while affixes may be non-salient
• Processes in derivational and inflexional morphology are salient if there is
transparency in the form-meaning relationship
• Phonetic features in prosodically prominent positions are salient
• Grammatical (perhaps mainly syntactic) features in interactionally
prominent positions are salient
Salience, then, is a useful notion only if the definition adopted avoids
circularity. As stated at the beginning of this section, this can only be
achieved if it is defined against extra-linguistic criteria, which will be a
combination of the cognitive, social psychological, pragmatic and
interactional factors listed above. Later in this article, we will see that we
need to add sociodemographic factors to this list. At the end of the article, we
present a model which incorporates the approach to salience just presented.
We turn now to the use of salience as an explanatory concept in language
change, with particular reference to that resulting from dialect contact. Our
attention focuses on the work of Trudgill, who (as we stated earlier) has
applied the concept in an explicit way.
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