Salience in Sociolinguistics


Book Description

This work proposes a definition of the notion of salience in sociolinguistics. Salient linguistic variants are those that are easily picked up by the listeners, and these stand in opposition to `invisible' variants, which are, even if they also show complex social stratification, completely ignored. Taking a quantitative angle, this work sees salience as a function of relative frequency differences, giving it an empirically testable operationalisation.




Perceptual Linguistic Salience: Modeling Causes and Consequences


Book Description

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the notion of salience in linguistics and related disciplines. While in top-down salience, perceivers endogenously direct their attention to a certain stimulus, in the bottom-up salience, it is the stimulus itself which attracts attention. In prototypical cases of bottom-up salience, the stimulus stands out because it is incongruous with a given ground by virtue of intrinsic physical characteristics. But a stimulus may also cause surprise by virtue of deviating from a cognitive ground, e.g., when violating social or probabilistic expectations. This has prompted researchers to examine the relationship between expectations and the perceptual salience of linguistic stimuli in new ways. This e-book features contributions from different scientific frameworks. The reader will find commentaries, reviews, and original research articles on models of sociolinguistic and morphological salience, the role of attention, affect, and predictability, and on how salient items are processed, categorized and learned. Taken together, the articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of how the perceptual salience of linguistic forms and variants can be theoretically framed and methodologically operationalized in different areas of linguistic processing.




Salience


Book Description

Salience refers to the prominence of information; salient items pop out and capture attention. This volume addresses the role of salience in discourse. It illustrates the range of multidisciplinary approaches - their diversities and similarities. The collection of papers covers a variety of research with different foci ranging from discourse entities, to discourse segments, to extra-linguistic factors.




Salience in Second Language Acquisition


Book Description

Salience in Second Language Acquisition brings together contributions from top scholars of second language acquisition (SLA) in a comprehensive volume of the existing literature and current research on salience. In the first book to focus exclusively on this integral topic, the editors and contributors define and explore what makes a linguistic feature salient in sections on theory, perpetual salience, and constructed salience. They also provide a history of SLA theory and discussion on its contemporary use in research. An approachable introduction to the topic, this book is an ideal supplement to courses in SLA, and a valuable resource for researchers and scholars looking for a better understanding of the subject.




Cognitive Contact Linguistics


Book Description

This volume serves to illustrate the promising insights to be gained when cross-fertilizing Cognitive Linguistics and contact linguistics, which each hold crucial ingredients to an encompassing study of contact-induced variation and change. Combining the study of the individual mind with the study of shared context, bridging research on experience and perspective with research on variation and change, and tackling the methodological complexities that this empirical approach to mental categorization entails, help us determine how the meaningful units that make up language are categorized and structured in the bi- and multilingual mind and, by extension, in any human mind. Together, the ten papers in this volume reveal the complexities of the interaction between usage, meaning and mind in contact-induced variation and change, which we hope will inspire future research exploring the possibilities of the cross-fertilization we have labeled Cognitive Contact Linguistics.




Salience and Defaults in Utterance Processing


Book Description

The book addresses controversies around the conscious vs automatic processing of contextual information and the distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning. It sheds new light on the relation of the literal/nonliteral distinction to the distinction between the automatic and conscious retrieval of information. The question of literal meaning is inherently interwoven with the question of lexical salience on one hand and default interpretations on the other. This volume addresses these interconnected issues, stressing their mutual interdependence. It contributes new, ground-breaking insights into the questions of literalness, semantics-pragmatics interface, automatic (default) retrieval and contextual pragmatic enrichment, modelling of discourse processing, lexical pragmatics, and other related issues.




Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics


Book Description

The book brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimenntal methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. In the book, methods are sought that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors. In terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional variation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation.




Sound change, priming, salience


Book Description

This volume investigates the realisation and perception of four phonological variables in Liverpool English (Scouse), with a special focus on their sociolinguistic salience. Younger speakers’ speech is found to be more local, but only for the two salient variables in the sample (NURSE-SQUARE and /k/ lenition), which appear to carry considerable amounts of covert prestige. Local variants of non-salient happy-tensing and velar nasal plus, on the other hand, are actually found to be receding, so at least to a certain extent Scouse also seems to be participating in regional dialect levelling. The importance of salience is also obvious in the perception data, with only the two highly salient stereotypes generating robust effects in a social priming experiment (albeit in the unexpected direction). These results indicate that the investigated variables differ measurably not only in their use in production, but also in terms of how central they are to mental sociolinguistic representations of Scouse. They also tell us more about the way we process, store, and (re-)use sociolinguistic variation in perception. By defining likely contexts for significant priming effects they might finally even help in coming up with a more elaborate




Sociolinguistics and Language Education


Book Description

This book, addressed to experienced and novice language educators, provides an up-to-date overview of sociolinguistics, reflecting changes in the global situation and the continuing evolution of the field and its relevance to language education around the world. Topics covered include nationalism and popular culture, style and identity, creole languages, critical language awareness, gender and ethnicity, multimodal literacies, classroom discourse, and ideologies and power. Whether considering the role of English as an international language or innovative initiatives in Indigenous language revitalization, in every context of the world sociolinguistic perspectives highlight the fluid and flexible use of language in communities and classrooms, and the importance of teacher practices that open up spaces of awareness and acceptance of --and access to--the widest possible communicative repertoire for students.




On Our Mind


Book Description

How do we learn to produce and comprehend non-literal language? Competing theories have only partially accounted for the variety of language comprehension evoked in metaphor, irony, and jokes. Rachel Giora has developed a novel and comprehensive theory, the Graded Salience Hypothesis, to explain figuative language comprehension. Giora contends that the salience of meanings (i.e., the cognitive priority we ascribe to words encoded in our mental lexicon) has the primary role in language comprehension and production.