Salience in Sociolinguistics: A Quantitative Approach

✍ Scribed by Péter Rácz

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: German
• Leaves: 184
• Series: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]; 84
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of figures
List of tables
1 Preliminaries
1.1 Salience and linguistic variation
1.1.1 Lexical reference and social indexation
1.1.2 Concepts and notations
1.1.3 Salience as low probability
1.2 Structure of the book
1.2.1 Methodology
1.2.2 Chapter structure
1.2.3 The case studies
1.3 Concluding remarks
2 Defining Salience
2.1 Salience as a general term
2.1.1 Salience in sociolinguistics
2.1.2 Salience in visual cognition
2.1.3 Selective attention in hearing
2.2 Operationalising sociolinguistic salience
2.2.1 Preliminaries
2.2.2 Defining salience
2.2.3 Exemplars and transitional probabilities
2.3 Concluding remarks
3 Methodology
3.1 Cognitive salience: main assumptions and considerations
3.2 Cognitive salience: further assumptions
3.3 Step-by-step corpus editing
3.4 Calculating transitional probabilities
4 Definite Article Reduction
4.1 Background
4.1.1 Details of the process
4.1.2 DAR as a salient variable
4.2 Analysis
4.2.1 Methods
4.2.2 Salience from token frequency
4.2.3 Salience from transitional probability
4.2.4 Further arguments for phonotactic distinctiveness
4.3 Concluding remarks
5 Glottalisation in the South of England
5.1 Background
5.1.1 Two recent studies
5.1.2 Salience and glottalisation
5.2 Analysis
5.2.1 Methods
5.2.2 The London-Lund Corpus
5.2.3 The Spoken Corpus of Adolescent London English
5.2.4 Modelling results
5.3 Concluding remarks
6 Hiatus resolution in Hungarian
6.1 Background
6.1.1 The perception of hiatus resolution: Methods
6.1.2 The perception of hiatus resolution: Results
6.1.3 Hiatus resolution and naïve linguistic awareness
6.2 Analysis
6.2.1 Corpus results
6.2.2 Main points
6.3 Concluding remarks
7 Derhoticisation in Glasgow
7.1 Background
7.1.1 Social stratification and social awareness
7.1.2 Derhoticisation in Glasgow
7.1.3 /r/ in Glasgow
7.1.4 Studies on coda /r/
7.1.5 Interim Summary
7.2 Analysis
7.2.1 The FRED study
7.2.2 Transitional probabilities in coda /r/ realisation
7.3 Concluding remarks
7.4 The operationalisation and relevance of salience
8 Salience and models of the lexicon
8.1 The relevance of salience
8.2 The duality of patterning
8.3 Modelling, phonetic variation and indexation
8.4 Summary
9 Salience and language change
9.1 Speaker indexation in sound change
9.1.1 Approaches to speaker indexation
9.1.2 Simulations on the role of indexation
9.2 Salience in the propagation of a change
9.2.1 Glottalisation in England
9.2.2 Derhoticisation in Scotland
9.3 Concluding remarks
10 Conclusions
10.1 The source of salience
10.1.1 From cognitive properties to language use
10.1.2 Consequences for phonological modelling
10.2 The predictability of salience
10.2.1 Types of phonological change
10.2.2 Consonants and vowels
10.2.3 Overview
10.3 Concluding remarks
Bibliography
Index