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The Referential Hierarchy and Attention

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The Referential Hierarchy and Attention The referential hierarchy and attention Spike Gildea* 1. INTRODUCTION This paper is a first step in opening a methodological discussion about both the definition and the explanation for SALIENCE in at least one of its uses in linguistics. The potential scope of the notion salience is enormous, as seen in the contributions to this volume and the wide-ranging discussions at the workshop where we reviewed each other’s papers. Some see salience in the speaker’s ability to attract attention to any part of the utterance (including notions such as evidentiality and modality); other see it in the means by which a speaker directs the listener to focus in on a given participant in a given utterance (a notion also often labeled “focus”); others seek to use the notion to explain selective morphological alternations in main clause grammar (as seen in inverse voice and differential argument marking). In this paper, I will address the notion of salience in a much more limited domain, as it has been used to characterize a hierarchy that conditions obligatory grammatical alternations in some languages. Silverstein (1976) gave the first characterization of what he called the “lexical hierarchy”, in which the marking of core grammatical relations is conditioned by the position of each on a hierarchy. Over the years, various authors have refined and renamed this hierarchy; it is what I refer to in the title as the Referential Hierarchy (Figure 1): 1 > 3PRO > PROPER N > HUMAN > ANIMATE > INANIMATE 2 Figure 1: The Referential Hierarchy Since then, multiple authors have written about various aspects of grammar conditioned by this hierarchy, including especially inversion and differential case-marking of A and P. Different linguists have offered distinct labels for what is essentially he same phenomenon: e.g., Dixon’s 1979/1994 NP HIERARCHY and 2010 NOMINAL HIERARCHY; Givón’s (1994/2001) GENERIC TOPICALITY HIERARCHY; Comrie’s (1989) features of ANIMACY and DEFINITENESS; DeLancey’s (1981, 2003) PERSON HIERARCHY, which privileges the opposition farthest to the left, that of first and second person (the SPEECH * University of Oregon; [email protected] 34 Spike Gildea ACT PARTICIPANTS) versus third persons; Bickel and Nichols’ (2007) INDEXABILITY HIERARCHY, which is organized according to “the ease to which a referent can be identified—or ‘indexed’—from within the speech act situation” (Bickel and Nichols 2007.224); and finally the work that uses the term in focus in this volume, Klaiman’s (1991) hierarchy of ONTOLOGICAL SALIENCE. Over the years, some aspects of the hierarchy have turned out not to be universally ranked (e.g., first person versus second person, singular versus plural), whereas others have remained quite firm (e.g., human > animate > inanimate). Most of these authors (and some others) have also sought to explain why the grammar of core arguments—especially differential case-marking and the selection between Direct and Inverse constructions—is sensitive to this hierarchy. Dixon (1979:85, 1994:84-5, 2010:138) suggests that items to the left of the hierarchy are those most likely “to be in A function rather than O function”, with first person seen as “the quintessential agent.” Thus, the less- likely agents (to the right of the hierarchy) and the less-likely patients (to the left of the hierarchy) receive special marking. Comrie (1989:129-30) makes a very similar suggestion regarding animacy (that more animate entities are more likely to be agents), but then changes the directionality of the correlation for definiteness, suggesting that agents are more likely to be definite (rather than that definite participants are more likely to be agents), and hence creating the connection between the hierarchy and the core roles of a transitive clause. DeLancey (1981/2003) suggests that the speech act participants represent the natural VIEWPOINT (closely related to PERSPECTIVE) of the speaker. In order to describe an event verbally, speakers must do a “mental scan” of that event as part of creating the mental representation that precedes sentence formulation; the agent is the natural STARTING POINT of such a scan. When the starting point and speaker viewpoint coincide, then the grammar is unmarked; special case- marking or direction marking ensues when the starting point and speaker viewpoint do not coincide. Givón (1994:22-3, 2001:156) argues that there is no unified hierarchy, but that the hierarchy is actually a series of oppositions (cf. Figure 2 for a subset) in which for each, the category to the left is higher in generic topicality than those on the right; since topics are more likely to be SUBJECTS, the unmarked situation is for entities on the left of the hierarchy to be subjects and those on the right to be objects. This is very similar to Klaiman’s (1991:162) claim, that voice is the grammaticization of the interaction between control (a component of agency) and ontological salience, defined as “prominence in the concerns of a typical speaker and hearer” (163). Person (deixis): SAP (1 & 2) > 3 Definiteness: PRONOUN > PROPER N > DEFINITE N > INDEFINITE N Animacy: HUMAN > ANIMATE > INANIMATE Contextual importance: PRIMARY TOPIC > SECONDARY TOPIC > NONTOPICAL Figure 2: Some subcomponents of the referential hierarchy All of these explanations make explicit claims about the mind of the speaker, invoking cognitive categories such as “salience”, “viewpoint”, and “likelihood to be an agent”, but none has sought insight from independent studies of .
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