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

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
• Variants are phonetically radically different
• Variants are involved in the maintenance of phonological contrasts
The importance of Trudgill’s conception is that it attempts to explain why
certain features are adopted, and others rejected, in dialect contact. Salience is
a factor that is additional to the list of seven ‘independent’ variables given
above. It hints at psycholinguistic explanations, though it does not do so
explicitly. In his discussion, Trudgill also covers attitudinal and
sociodemographic factors which may lead to stigmatisation. Trudgill takes the
reader through a number of examples of features which are regularly adopted
by speakers in dialect contact situations, and some which are not, the
conclusion being that salient features are the ones acquired. There are,
however, three provisos. First, features which are too ‘difficult’ are acquired
late (if, for instance, they involve the learning of a new contrast). Second,
they are avoided if they result in homonymic clash in the speaker’s original
dialect. Finally, they are avoided if they have extra-strong salience, that is,
the features are (for the speakers) overly strong markers of the dialect being
accommodated to.
However, there are two related sources of circularity and therefore loss
of explanatory power in Trudgill’s argument. The first has been discussed by
other authors, particularly Hinskens (1996), and concerns the idea of extrastrong
salience. It appears that the very factors that lead speakers to notice
and to adopt new features, including the five listed above, are precisely those
that also lead to a feature being avoided. If we just look at features which are
salient, there is no way of predicting, on purely linguistic grounds, which ones
will be adopted and which avoided – there is no objective measure either
proposed, or even possible (it seems to us) that can achieve this (on this point,
see also the discussion in Kerswill forthcoming). Instead, we must have
recourse to non-linguistic information lying outside the stricter definition of
salience. We argue later that it is these extra-linguistic factors that, in the end,
are the decisive ones.
But problems lie in the five factors themselves. All of these, Trudgill
argues, lead to speakers becoming aware of a feature. However, even here it
is possible detect difficulties. We deal with the factors in reverse order. The
only non-controversial factor among the five is probably the last one: even
though current phonological theories do not necessarily operate with the idea
of ‘contrast’, we are still dealing with differences that must be incorporated in
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