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SFB 1252:  Prominence in Language

Subject Area Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2017
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Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281511265
 
Prominence is a key notion in our understanding of language as a flexible system. It plays a major role in building linguistic structures and in organizing the information communicated into coherent and continually updated discourse representations. In phase I, we developed and tested the following tripartite definition of prominence: Def1: Prominence is a relational property that singles out one element from a set of elements of equal type and structure; Def2: Prominent elements are structural attractors, i.e. they serve as anchors for the larger structures they are constituents of, and they may license more operations than their competitors; Def3: Prominence status shifts over time (as discourse unfolds). Our research has shown that this definition provides a reliable and distinctive approach to prominence in language and allows us to compare prominence-related phenomena with different methodologies and across different linguistic subdisciplines (typology, phonology and phonetics, morphosyntax, semantics, discourse pragmatics, psycho- and neurolinguistics). While the CRC is organized into three areas (prosody, morphosyntax and semantics, discourse), our research has made it clear that most prominence-related phenomena support discourse organization and thus appear to be motivated, at least in part, by their function in organizing discourse. Phase II is designed to further substantiate this foundational insight both empirically and by way of explicit modelling. We plan inter alia to extend the investigation of the candidate space for prominence relations beyond only two competing elements, to integrate observations from larger discourse domains, to include signed language, and to provide more precise accounts of the interaction between the various dimensions that induce prominence. Furthermore, we will elaborate the dynamicity of prominence in a discourse model, in particular by modelling the forward function of prominent units. The CRC will thus continue to investigate prominence as a dynamic linguistic principle that links phenomena from different parts of the grammar to more general contextual, cognitive, and communicative domains. In addition to significantly improving our understanding of how language works, we expect our research to contribute substantially to the study of the interface between language and other aspects of human cognition.
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres

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Applicant Institution Universität zu Köln
Spokespersons Professor Dr. Klaus von Heusinger, until 12/2021; Professorin Dr. Petra Schumacher, since 1/2022
 
 

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