SFB 1252:  Prominence in Language

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2017
• Website: Homepage
• 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

Current projects

• A01 - Intonation and attention orienting: Neurophysiological and behavioural correlates (Project Heads Grice, Martine ;  Schumacher, Petra )
• A02 - Individual behaviour in encoding and decoding prosodic prominence (Project Heads Grice, Martine ;  Vogeley, Kai )
• A03 - Prosodic prominence in cross-linguistic perspective (Project Head Himmelmann, Nikolaus )
• A04 - Dynamic modelling of prosodic prominence (Project Head Mücke, Doris )
• A06 - De-)linking prosodic and discourse prominence: The case of non-assertive speech acts (Project Head Repp, Sophie )
• A07 - Metrical prominence – Scales and structures (Project Head Baumann, Stefan )
• B01 - Prominence phenomena in Slavic languages (Project Head Buncic, Daniel )
• B02 - Split case marking and constituent order variation in East Africa (Project Heads Hellwig, Ph.D., Birgit ;  Mitchell, Alice )
• B04 - Interaction of nominal and verbal features for Differential Object Marking (Project Heads García García, Marco ;  von Heusinger, Klaus )
• B05 - Prominence-related structures in symmetrical voice systems and Papuan languages (Project Head Himmelmann, Nikolaus )
• B06 - Attention and prominence in language production and acquisition (Project Head Penke, Martina )
• B08 - Non-canonical alignment and agreement patterns in East Baltic (Project Head Hill, Eugen )
• B09 - Prominence in action: Referent representation in German Sign Language (DGS) (Project Head Perniss, Pamela )
• C02 - Tense and aspect in discourse (Project Head Becker, Martin Gunter )
• C03 - Reference management in bilingual narratives (Project Heads Bongartz, Christiane ;  Torregrossa, Jacopo )
• C04 - Conceptual and referential activation in discourse (Project Head von Heusinger, Klaus )
• C05 - Discourse referents as perspectival centres (Project Head Hinterwimmer, Stefan )
• C06 - Prominence in subordinating rhetorical relations (Project Head Jasinskaja, Katja )
• C07 - Forward and backward functions of discourse anaphora (Project Head Schumacher, Petra )
• C09 - Prominence and predictive modelling (Project Heads Grice, Martine ;  Himmelmann, Nikolaus ;  Schumacher, Petra )
• INF - Data, design and sustainability (Project Heads Himmelmann, Nikolaus ;  Reiter, Nils )
• Z01 - Central Services (Project Heads von Heusinger, Klaus ;  Schumacher, Petra )

Completed projects

• A05 - Prominence marking and language contact in Spanish (Project Head Uth, Melanie )
• B03 - Agent prominence and the diachrony of predication in Indo-Aryan (Project Heads Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. ;  Reinöhl, Uta )
• B07 - Agentivity as a key to prominence: Experimental approaches to argument alternations in German (Project Heads Philipp, Markus ;  Primus, Beatrice )
• C01 - Prominence and information structure (Project Head Adli, Aria )
• Ö - Ö Project (Project Heads Adli, Aria ;  von Heusinger, Klaus )

• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Participating University: Bergische Universität Wuppertal; Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Klaus von Heusinger, until 12/2021; Professorin Dr. Petra Schumacher, since 1/2022