COGNITIVE BASES OF SALIENCE IN LANGUAGE AND TEXT
Abstract
The article explores the cognitive bases of salience in language and text. The special emphasis rests on the key types of salience, the processes of construction and perspectivization, the degree hierarchy and stylistic potential of salience. Salience is treated as a property that determines both the general selective nature of the information perception process and the specificity of foregrounding. As a rule, in the speech context, the most and least significant elements can be presented in terms of attention distribution, which indicates the dichotomy of salient and non-salient structures. Salience is primarily determined by the orientation towards transferring cognitive and ontological properties, according to which the most important conceptual fragments of information and attractive features that characterize the selectivity of perception and focusing the attention of the addressee acquire a special significance. The degrees of salience are determined by the fact that the property of salience and the alternativity of construal and perspectivization processes in the language presuppose the obvious distinction between salient and non-salient structures, as well as the most distinguished, distinguished and the least distinguished elements. As a rule, this kind of hierarchy of salience degrees has become relevant mainly due to the research in the field of cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics. At the same time, this problem is of special importance within the framework of cognitive-stylistic studies of the text, in particular, in exploring the foregrounding devices and techniques.
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