<b>Structural, distributional and sociocognitive salience

Abstract

 In order to identify what social meanings certain linguistic variant is associated with, in Sociolinguistic, variation and change processes are usually analyzed from production or perception approach. Salience is a conceptual artifact that can be used to articulate the two perspectives of approach. Three possibilities for approaching the salience in sociolinguistics are presented - structural, distributional and cognitive, from which considerations about the effect of the salience on the processes of linguistic variation and change are presented. This paper aims to present the concept of salience and its effect in linguistic variation considering the language structure and the cognition of the speakers: the effects of the salience in the linguistic structure are surfaced as phonic, syntactic and semantic salience; and the effects on the cognition of the speakers are surfaced in the relation between the frequency of occurrence of a variable and its degree of predictability and prototyping in a context, and the speaker's perception. Understanding the relationship between the salience in the linguistic structure and in the cognition of the speakers in processes of linguistic variation allows to identify the triggers of social prejudice, since salient features tend to be indexed to social profiles at the awareness.