25.2443, Review: Cognitive Science; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: R=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A1cz_?=(2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-2443. Thu Jun 05 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.2443, Review: Cognitive Science; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Rácz (2013)

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Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 08:34:42
From: Victor Fernandez-Mallat [victor.fernandez.mallat at gmail.com]
Subject: Salience in Sociolinguistics

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3756.html

AUTHOR: Péter  Rácz
TITLE: Salience in Sociolinguistics
SUBTITLE: A Quantitative Approach
SERIES TITLE: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] 84
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Victor Fernandez-Mallat, Universität Freiburg

SUMMARY

As the author states in the preliminaries, this monograph is intended for
scholars or university students who want to become acquainted with salience as
a theme in linguistics, and, particularly, in sociolinguistics. Rácz believes
that, so far, the concept of salience in sociolinguistics has been regarded as
having a wide range of properties, from being equated with high token
frequency to being attributed an extra-linguistic property (see Siegel 2010:
120-127 for examples). In sum, the author argues that it has been loosely
defined. Thus, one of the general objectives of this book is to give a narrow
definition of salience in sociolinguistics. Among the other objectives are:
putting forward a singular scheme to make salience operational, and
ascertaining the theoretical relevance of salience, particularly, in the field
of language change, which is understood here as the way that novel variants
are transmitted in a speech community.

With these objectives in mind, the book is divided into three parts (excluding
the preliminaries chapter). Part I (pp. 23-54) reviews for us how the notion
of sociolinguistic salience has been practiced so far, builds up a narrow
definition of salience, and introduces a method to make salience operational.
Part II (pp. 55-128) consists of four case studies (definite article
reduction, glottalisation in the south of England, hiatus resolution in
Hungarian, and derhoticisation in Glasgow) in which the mechanism of making
salience operational is used. Part III (pp. 129-156) puts forward the
importance of the notion of salience to a theory of language change.

Part I

This section can be divided into four subsections. In the first one (pp.
23-25), Rácz provides an overview on how salience has been traditionally
defined in phonology, as well as in morphology. He argues that, whereas in
phonology a salient feature is one that stands out among others and that will
be noticeable both for linguists and language users, in morphology, a pattern
can be considered more salient if it is less marked from the point of view of
complexity, thus, “the more regular the pattern, the more it adheres to the
structure, the more salient it will be” (p. 24), in comparison to others, of
course.

In the second section (pp. 25-31), Rácz outlines how the concept has been
generally framed in the field of sociolinguistics, where it “aspires for a
status as a stand-alone theoretical concept” (p. 25). He claims that it has
been interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it can be used to allude to
linguistic variables that bear social indexation, and thus behave differently,
for example, in language contact situations. In this sense, salience is not
more than a synonym for ‘marker’ (cf. Labov 1972). On the other hand, it can
be a tag applied to variables that have perceptual and/or cognitive
prominence, that is, salience has an external basis and it cannot be justified
only by social dynamics. According to Rácz, opting for the second possibility
enables us to find a general ground for salience, whereas opting for the first
one means that we give up on finding a universal definition of it.

In the third section (pp. 31-35), Rácz looks at salience in visual cognition,
where it is seen as a notion connected to surprise in human perception. To put
it simply, one could consider an entity surprising (thus salient) if its
presence has a high information value compared to its surroundings. In other
words, according to the field of visual cognition, an entity is salient when
its presence among other entities is unexpected.

As we can see in the fourth section of Part I (pp. 36-54), Rácz turns to
salience in visual cognition to implement his own definition of salience in
sociolinguistics, and to subsequently make it operational. Based on his
immersion in the aforementioned field, he defines it as follows: “A segment is
cognitively salient if it has a large surprisal value when compared to an
array of language input” (p. 37). One of the main points that the author
underlines is that salience is a relative concept, that is to say, it is
always interpreted in a context. A linguistic variable can be considered
salient when its behaviour in a dialect is different enough from another one
(usually the norm) to be surprising for language users of the latter.
Particular emphasis is also placed on the fact that socially salient variables
are always cognitively salient, but that the opposite is not always the case.
As for making salience operational, one must measure surprisal through the
comparison of the transitional probabilities of the segmental realisations of
the variable under study, that is, through the contrast of differences in the
distributions of the segmental realisations of a variable in two dialects.

Part II

The first case study presented by Rácz is on definite article reduction (DAR)
in the North of England (pp. 55-69), which he defines as a glottal stop
variant of word-initial “the”, as in, for example, ‘the day’ [ʔdeɪ] or ‘the
order’ [ʔodə]. The author argues that even if glottal stops are already
present in Standard English (that is, they exist in the speech string and thus
will not be totally surprising for listeners), DAR’s salience can be explained
by its unlikelihood of occurrence in the aforementioned position. Therefore,
it can be said that DAR’s salience lies in the distribution of its
realisations, not in its presence. The author also points out that DAR’s
cognitive salience makes it an ideal candidate for being a marker. Indeed, he
stresses that it has been used for a long time in England as a feature to
illustrate typical Northern speech; thus “one can safely says that DAR is a
dialectal marker, used to express social or regional differences” (p. 59).

Rácz continues with the case of the glottalisation of /t/ in Southern English
(pp. 71-86), a well-documented feature that has been reported by various
authors (e.g. Williams & Kerswill 1999). Nowadays, it can occur in all
positions, but it is vigorously avoided among the middle class and upper
middle class before vowels -- both word-finally and word-medially. According
to the author, one possible explanation for this avoidance is that, unlike
pre-consonantal glottalisation -- a phonetically natural phenomenon whose
occurrence has been reported for a while now, pre-vocalic glottalisation is
rather new. Thus, its transitional probability is basically equal to zero. In
other words, any glottal stop in this environment is extremely unexpected,
thus it has a large surprisal value compared to pre-consonantal
glottalisation. Consequently, the author suggest that the glottalisation of
/t/ has developed salience as it spread to a new environment.

The third case study deals with hiatus resolution in Hungarian (pp. 89-100).
Rácz argues that while it is obligatory in vowel clusters including [i], and
variable in clusters with [eː], it is quite innovative in clusters with [ɛ].
Hence, for Educated Colloquial Hungarian (ECH) speakers, who are said to be
non-innovative, the third hiatus resolution pattern is cognitively salient,
since its occurrence has a large surprisal value compared to the first two
hiatus resolution patterns. In order to evaluate if cognitive salience
translates to social salience, Rácz performed an attitude study with native
speakers of ECH. The results show that ECH speakers are aware of the
innovative hiatus resolution pattern regarding the conservative one. According
to the author, the innovative hiatus resolution pattern’s salience emerges
from a difference in transitional probabilities, which “renders the pattern
less familiar to the listeners” (p. 99). The low probability of occurrence for
the pattern was confirmed by data that he draws from the Hungarian Webcorpus.

The last case study presented by Rácz deals with derhoticisation (the
vocalisation of coda /r/) in Glasgow (pp. 101-128), which is, probably, one of
the most widely researched sociolinguistic features in English studies (cf.
Stuart-Smith et al. 2007, for example). Rácz shows that this feature lacks
social salience despite meeting the requirements for being sociolinguistically
salient, namely, it displays differences in segmental distributions and clear
social stratification; and that this dearth of salience can be linked to an
absence of cognitive salience, that is to say, to a lack of surprisal in its
distributions. The latter can be tied to the important extent of inherent
variation exhibited by derhoticisation. Therefore, this is a sort of
counterexample to the previous case studies.

Part III

This section considers the relevance of both cognitive salience and its social
indexation to linguistic theory. One of the questions that Rácz puts forward
is whether we should assume a distinction between salient and non-salient
variables outside the field of sociolinguistics. The author argues that
cognitive salience has strong consequences to models of linguistic competence,
in that it grants us to depict salient variation and its counterpart,
non-salient variation, and explain why the latter receives no consideration
from language users. Rácz also shows salience’s relevance to linguistic
change, namely sound change. He shows that for the case of network-based
models of change (cf. Milroy 2007, Eckert 2000, among others), which pay
considerable attention to speaker/variant prestige in sound change, the theory
of salience that he defends provides additional support, because it puts at
one’s disposal self-reliant tools to confirm the salience of a variable.

EVALUATION

This book is sure to appeal to scholars and students that are particularly
interested in the notion of salience in sociolinguistics. It introduces a
corpus-based (i.e. empirical) approach to appraising the salience of
phonological variation -- both at a cognitive and a social level, and
contributes a procedure and case studies for this approach. Moreover, it is
also a work that can be appealing for researchers of fields such as linguistic
change and general linguistic theory, since that, in the third part of the
book, the author took the trouble to show how the notion of salience that he
puts forward can be used in these fields. It can thus be said that the author
has achieved the goals set at the beginning of this book.

In spite of that, this book is not without a few (very) minor issues. For one
thing, Rácz introduces a new terminology in place of such conventional terms
as ‘indicators’ and ‘markers’ (cf. Labov 1972), for ‘cognitive salience’ and
‘social salience’, respectively. Although, thanks to the author’s entrance in
the field of visual cognition, this is totally justified, and his approach
ends up making these concepts’ understanding a lot easier, and their
operationalization more practical. The other minor issue might be that of all
the case studies presented, none analyzed salience in so-called standard
dialects. Indeed, the four case studies presented by Rácz describe how a
feature from a nonstandard dialect is salient from the perspective of a
standard one. I am really curious to know how the author would use these
concepts and their operationalization in cases that adopt the opposite
perspective, that is to say, in cases where salience is analyzed from a
nonstandard dialect and its speakers.

These minor issues aside, this book is an interesting and useful resource for
corpus-based research in the field of sociolinguistics.

REFERENCES

Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice: The
linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.

Milroy, Leslie. 2007. Off the shelf or under the counter? On the social
dynamics of sound changes. Studies in History of the English Language 3.
149-172.

Siegel, Jeff. 2010. Second Dialect Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins & Fiona Tweedie. 2007. Talkin’ jockney?
Variation and change in Glaswegian accent. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (2).
221-260.

Williams, Ann & Paul Kerswill. 1999. Dialect levelling; change and continuity
in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Paul Foulkes & Gerard Docherty (eds.),
Urban voices. Accent studies in the British Isles, 141-162. London: Edward
Arnold.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Víctor Fernández-Mallat is currently an associate researcher for the Research
training group GRK DFG 1624/1 “Frequency effects in language” and a lecturer
for University of Basel’s Institut für Iberoromanistik. His research interests
include sociolinguistic variation and change, dialects in contact, and
Hispanic linguistics. His current research project focuses on the interplay of
convergence and divergence processes in dialect contact situations.








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