Salience Criteria of Indirect Non-Entrenched Textual Names in Russian: Corpus-Based Research

Abstract

The article approaches textual foreground specifics of indirect non-entrenched names and nominal groups in the Russian language. These constructions reveal the results of particular focus shifts with both identifying and characterizing or classifying components as part of their referent representation. To foreground them, the author uses a group of linguistic markers or means of expression with the intention of bringing forward their relevant character and helping the reader recognize the referent. The research is corpus-based, featuring Russian narrative prose texts, which serve to define the linguistic (lexical and syntactic) means of expressing indirect non-entrenched textual names and nominal groups. The data help reveal the salience criteria where salience is defined through significantly higher frequency of expression means. It also uncovers some resonance dependencies of these salience criteria (with graphical criteria role considered as well), which are manifested to foreground indirect non-entrenched names. The work shows that apart from general salience markers (rhematic position of names, mononuclear syntactic phrase, featuring the author’s perspective, etc.), which have become the research issue in the works of T. Givón, B. Wårwik, A. Siewierska, M. Ariel, O. Iriskhanova and some other linguists, there may be distinguished the salience criteria specific for the textual indirect non-entrenched names and nominal groups. Relative frequency analysis of 28 test parameters values revealed the group of these salience criteria, among which are the textual markers of embodied construal, the presence of a direct name in pre-position, a discreet or single referent marking, null propositional distance between direct and indirect names, coordinative chain of direct and indirect names, predicative position and position in mononuclear sentences, the presence of identifying attributes and rhematic markers in co-referent indirect names.

Keywords

• salience criteria
• indirect non-entrenched names
• nominal groups
• corpus-based research
• narrative prose text
• conceptual referent