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

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
sociodemographic and social psychological factors to produce varying
levels of salience. In this respect, they do not differ from phonological
features, though the details of the factors vary
6. A model of salience
Discussing salience in a way that divorces it from language-external factors
leads to a failure to gain insights into the social patterning of linguistic
features; at worst, to do so leads to circularity and labelling. If we suspect that
a feature is salient for speakers because of its particular patterning (in terms of
acquisition, change or variation), we start by checking for language-internal
factors. But we must immediately look for extra-linguistic factors that might
be linked to the salience. These factors, as we saw in the early part of this
article, are extremely varied and sometimes complex. We argued that, of
Trudgill’s five factors, only the two language-internal ones (phonetic
difference and phonological contrast) fully avoid circularity. It was also
suggested that we cannot immediately say whether these two factors are a
potential cause of salience, since they may also be a result of prior salience.
The data from the Dialect Levelling project shows that these two factors do
not always lead to features becoming salient, and that features which do not
fulfil the criteria for either factor (or show relatively small phonetic
differences, like Reading PRICE) may nevertheless be salient. Thus, there are
no necessary and sufficient conditions which must be met in order for a
linguistic feature to be salient – barring the obvious one that differences
between its presence and absence must be noticeable in a psychoacoustic
sense.
More explicitly, we see the social psychological property of ‘salience’,
which may be attached to a feature by language users, as being linked to
internal and external factors as outlined in the following model. Any
operationalisation of the salience notion must involve a match between three
components:
1. the presence of a linguistic phenomenon whose explanation we suspect
may be due to the salience of the linguistic feature or features involved.
Typically, the phenomenon will be a particular pattern observed in
language change, language variation, the variable behaviour of
individual speakers, or the acquisition of a linguistic feature. In cases of
90