2012
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Alexandru Mardale, « DESPRE CONCEPTUL DE SALIENŢĂ LINGVISTICĂ ŞI CĂROR FENOMENE CORESPUNDE ÎN LIMBA ROMÂNĂ », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10670/1.w00zik
Some recent linguistic studies have been based on a concept that has not been defined yet, to our knowledge, in Romanian linguistics. Namely, it is about the notion of saliency (cf. Fr. saillance < Engl. saliency). This term is rather new, even at international level. However, the phenomena it describes are not. It has been first in use in psycho-cognitive sciences, dealing with the analysis of the form of an object (cf. Gestalt theory), but also in visual sciences, to show the detachment of a figure on a ground. Broadly speaking, some researchers have assimilated in this concept the prominence phenomena, while others have related it to contrasting, emphasis or, in other words, making prominent. Whatever the definition level, one thing seems to be common in all of them: to be salient means to first come to one's mind, visually, to catch one's attention (Landragin 2007). Starting from these features, linguists have taken the concept, exploiting it first in stylistics. Recently, its use has been extended to other fields as well, from sentence discourse organisation to morphosyntax and semantics. It is admitted that a linguistic object is salient when it has a series of special lexical, syntactic, semantic and/or prosodic properties. This article proposes to deal extensively with the concept of linguistic saliency and to support it with data from Romanian. Namely, we will re-discuss, considering this concept, some well-known phenomena, which we will try to interpret as instantiations of linguistic saliency: issues related to the sentence information structure, especially strong topicalisation and focalisation.