Salience in the performance of one speech act: The case of definitions

Abstract

Salience, a concept little analyzed in linguistics/pragmatics, is defined here as that quality which determines how semantic material is distributed within a sentence or discourse, in terms of the relative emphasis which is placed on its various parts. This article explores the concept of salience as it is manifested in the performance of one speech act, that of defining. The salience of definitions functions on two levels: salience of the various information components of the speech act in relation to each other, and salience of the overall speech act within the total discourse. The former is interpreted in terms of “functional sentence perspective.” The latter is created internally by precision of propositional content, pragmatic function, syntactic form, distribution of information, lexical “boosters” and “downtoners,” and repetition; externally by “grounders” and “confirmations” and paralinguistically by emphatic stress, graphic, and other visual reinforcement.