Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This volume includes articles presented at the sixth International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse in Chorin, Germany, in 2005, whose theme was salience in discourse. The collection begins with the editors’ introduction, which sets the scene for the chapters that follow by providing state of the art research and a snapshot of the following chapters.

Focusing on salience of discourse entities, Part 1 begins with Olga Krasavina’s study, which addresses the connection between salience demonstratives in Russian. Using corpus and experimental methods, she discovers that the former plays a limited role in the discursive use of the latter. Andrey Y. Filchenko analyzes certain grammatical constructions in an indigenous language in North Siberia, stressing that discourse salience is gradient, dynamic, and sensitive to cultural context. Through corpus analysis, Ralph L. Rose examines the influence of syntactic and semantic factors on pronominal reference and suggests that the combination of both syntactic and semantic information will result in greater predictive power for the salience of discourse referents. Part 1 concludes with Christian Chiarcos’s introduction of the mental salience framework, a salience-based computational framework for the context-adequate generation of referring expressions in discourse. On this basis, the author proposes a parameterized framework as architecture for handling cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms of attention control in discourse.

Part 2 contains two chapters extending salience beyond entities in discourse (to discourse relations or rhetorical relations) with evidence from crosslinguistic comparison and from diachronic language change, respectively. By comparing coordination markers in Norwegian, German, and English, Wiebke Ramm challenges the universality of discourse relations and demonstrates that the linguistic manifestations of salience are varied and display crosslinguistic variation. Drawing on a corpus of Old High German, Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova reveal that in the earliest development of German, verb placement was governed by and sensitive to salient-related pragmatic factors as well as discourse-structural factors.

The three contributions in Part 3 address extra-linguistic salience. John D. Kelleher’s article proposes a framework for reference resolution in visually situated dialogs, exploiting a weighted integration of both linguistic and visual salience scores to rank the potential referents located in the multimodal situation. Building on centering theory, Birgitta Bexten puts forward a model for a sufficient description of plurilinear hypertext, integrating not only linguistic salience but also non-linguistic paratextually marked salience. Finally, with empirical support, Berry Claus presents a simulation approach to text comprehension and its implications for non-linguistic salience. This approach claims that language comprehension is achieved by mentally simulating what is being described in a text; thus, in this approach, which entities are being simulated and how they are recaptured in the simulation will affect the salience of referents.

Produced by scholars with a wide range of research backgrounds, the articles in this book represent multidisciplinary and multidimensional research on salience in discourse or beyond discourse to include non-linguistic aspects.