Abstract
AbstractA commonly used concept in linguistics is salience. Oftentimes it is used without definition, and the meaning of the concept is repeatedly assumed to be self-explanatory. The definitions that are provided may vary greatly from one operationalization of salience to the next. In order to find out whether it is possible to postulate an overarching working definition of linguistic salience that subsumes usage across linguistic subdomains, we review these different operationalizations of linguistic salience. This article focuses on salience in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition (SLA), and semantics. In this article, we give an overview of how these fields operationalize salience. Finally, we discuss correlations and contradictions between the different operationalizations.
Highlights
Salience is a concept used in a variety of studies across different fields
Linguistic publications that refer to salience often fail to provide a working definition of the term and use it to refer to phenomena as diverse as surprise, frequency, acoustic prominence, and more
The other two sub-disciplines, second-language acquisition (SLA) and semantics, are included because many of the texts we found came from these sub-disciplines and did not explicitly link to sociolinguistics or cognitive linguistics
Summary
Salience is a concept used in a variety of studies across different fields. Still, it remains unclear just what the concept of salience is. 714 Vincent Boswijk and Matt Coler different notions of salience They conclude that salience is the result of assessing incoming linguistic information based on existing expectations in the individual, which are triggered by an interaction of perceived linguistic, situational and societal context, and the long-term memory-based cognitive context (Schmid and Günther 2016). Because of these differing internal contexts, a feature can be salient for one person and non-salient for another, or it can be salient for both but for different reasons.
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