Summary

How does salience arise?

I would like to consider how a certain linguistics feature becomes salient in a language and
whether there is a predactibility involved. There are several checklist of saliance triggers.
Acoustic prominence contributes to sailence, the phonetic distinction between two sounds can be
perceived and the fact that this two sounds are phonems.
Homophonic merger this type assumes that in some stage in the development of a variety
continal variation became discrete variation. Homophonic merge would appear to have occurred
in varieties of Irish English with the shift of dental plosives to alveoral stops.
for ex: thank [tk] tank [tk]
Deletion and insertion- this mean that any taxonomy of saliance must also take the processes of
deletion and insertion into account. Deletion often takes the form of cluster simplification which
can be regarded as a fast speech phenomenon which may become established in a
variety.Insertion apear to show saliance. In southern Irish English the isertion of a centaralised
short vowel is common and fulfils the phonological function of breaking up heavy syllable codes
by disallabifivation. film /[flm] -[flm].
Gramatical restruction- any feature which involves gramatical restrction would appear to be
saliant for native speakers.
Openness of word-class-saliance almost certanly has to do with the openness of a word class, the
high awrness which native speakers have of lexical items which are arhaic or typical of varieties
more colloquial than the supra regional one.
The loss of vernacular features-one view of this could be that when a prononciation item
bescomes salient and conscious for members of a speech community for instance, when the
variant crosses a barrier and becomes identical with an allophone of another phonem it is then
abandoned or the merger is reversed.
Retention of conditional realisation a subtype of this phenomen involves phonetically
conditioned realisation. The raising /a/ before /r/ must be seen in the cntext of another
vowelrealisation in the same phonetic environment. This is where an original / /is lowered to /a/
before /r/.e.g. barn,dark,. It looks as if there were two movments in oppsing directions in early
modern Iresh English://-> /a/and /a///, as in sarve for serve, sarvaint for servant.



Reaction to salience
Hypercorrection is dubbions means of ridding one s speech of salient local features. Most people
who engage in hypercorrectionnotice that their hypocorrect pronuncitations are not in fact
standard and may well be the object of derision by those who indeed speak something
approaching the atandard.
In some cases english already had initial strees, but Irish English retained this on the second
syllable which was long, nowadays the only remnant of this late stress is found in verbs with
long vowels in the third syllables.e.g educate [ d u:ke:t]. The southern mainland English
lowering of back high vowels before/r/ had not occurred in Ireland by the late eighteenth centary but
introduced by lexically replacing those prononciations which conflicted with mainland British usage.
An important point to be made concerning salience is that speakers may deliberately manipulate salient
features. Irish English has evelved a technique of attaining local flavouring. This consists of maintaining
two forms of a single lexeme, one the British standard one and another an archaic or regional
prononciation which differs in connotation from the first. The second usage is always found an a more
colloquial level and plays an important role in establishing the profile of vernacular Irish English.
Questions
How a certain linguistics feature becomes salient in a language?
Which is the more educated section of a community exhibit?
In which case local flavouring are transmitted through time and hence?


Ersana Miftaroska