Salience, Stigma and Standard

The notion of salience present a phenomenon which is generally recognised by

linguists but which is difcult to quantify.
Salience is dealing with conscious aspects of language, which speakers are aware
of some linguistic feature. It is consider that the role of salience in language change
then one must determine if a feature can be said to be salient for more or less the
entire community using a variety.
A further step would be elicitation, i.e to ask of speakers to listen to a stretch of
speech and comment this method would only provide useful results in a synchronic
study.
It is probably fair to say that the elements in a variety or language which are most
salient for its speakers are those used in linguistic stereotypes. These are prominent
features which speakers manipulate consciously, largely to achieve some kind of
comic eect.
Stereotypes in varieties of !nglish have a long origin, no less writers than
Shakespeare and "en #ohnson attempted to indicate Irish !nglish in their palys. $or
e%ample, every instance of &s & is wrriten as sh ,or ph - derivinig from Irish &f&.
The use of sh for /s/ , particularly before high vowels and in syllable codas
before consonants, is not something which is relevant for present'day forms of Irish
!nglish.
(ariables which are not involved in systematic variation in style are called
indicators. These do not contribute to the description of class dierences as markers
do, since speakers appear to be less aware of the social implications of an indicator
than a marker. These indicators are found on all stylistic levels of )southern* Irish
!nglish and en+oy a low level of awareness among speakers.
Indicators and markers show the same lack degree of salience, respectively, when
the dierences are morphological. A clear e%ample of this is aorded by the forms
of the second person plural in Irish !nglish.
The form which en+oys a much greater degree of awareness is that with an added
plural & S& , phonetically &,&.
Youse &+u,& you'plural
yes &+i,&
$or middle'class speakers )southern* Irish !nglish this quite stigmati,ed. It is only
found among uneducated speakers or in deliberate imitations of the speech of such
group and is thus characteristic of stereotypes.
Syntactic structures seem not to have an identi-cation function equal to
phonological factors as there as there may well be stretches of speech in which a
given syntactic variable does not occur at all. .ithin synta% there would appear to
be two types of conte% /0* high 1pro-le conte%ts used for variables which have high
social signi-cance for speakers and which are typically found in main clauses
containing emphatic emphatic declaratives or e%plicit negatives, and 2* low'pro-le
conte%ts used for variables which are incoming and in the process of being adopted
by diusion into a community.

34!STI56/
0* !%plan the notion of salience and its role in !nglish language7
2* .hat are the indicators and describe their dierence with markers7
8* 9ow many types of conte%t would appear to be in within synta%7



Merita Seferi