Rácz Péter

Frequency and salience in sociolinguistics  

 

 

The aim of this talk is to provide a working definition for the widely used concept of sociolinguistic salience. This definition relies on the connection between the salience of a sociolinguistic variable and the variable's frequency, namely, the transitional probabilities of the segmental realisations of the variable across idiolects or dialects. The talk surveys the notion of salience as used in linguistics, particularly in studies of linguistic variation, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. It then goes on to provide an operationalisation of the concept in sociolinguistics, along with a methodology to establish empirically testable boundaries for it. It is also shown how a frequency-based definition of sociolinguistic salience contributes a lot to rich-memory language modelling, which is exactly the type of framework assumed for most studies of frequency effects on language structure.