Mental salience and grammatical form: toward a framework for salience metrics in natural language generation

ing from these minor conceptual difficulties, however, the markedness hierarchy established so far corresponds to the ‘consensus hierarchy’ that was proposed in Sect. 2.1.4.1 as a generalization over different hierarchies of referring expressions found in linguistic literature. Correspondingly, hierarchies of referring expressions as discussed in Sect. 2.1.2 can be interpreted as markedness hierarchies. One fundamental difference, however, between these cognitivefunctional models and the markedness hierarchy in (3.4) is that (3.4) is firmly grounded on empirically verifiable, surface-oriented markedness measurements, rather than with reference to a particular ranking of hypothetical cognitive categories. The application of markedness measurements also allows developing alternative markedness hierarchies. We can introduce additional distinctions between packaging phenomena, e.g., a differentiation between different forms of names similar to Ariel’s (1990, p.208) spectrum of cognitive statuses associated with full names, full name + description, title + last name, last name, first name, etc. Similarly, the markedness hierarchy can be augmented with language-specific grammatical devices, as I do not predict that the hierarchy itself is cross-linguistically applicable or even universal, but only that the underlying ordering principles are. In the same way as Ariel’s accessibility marking scale, this markedness hierarchy is thus extensible. As an illustration, consider possessive NPs: Possessives have been assumed to represent referents with low degrees of hearer salience by Prince (1981, possessive pronouns ‘anchor’ brand-new entities), and we can expect that this is reflected in a high degree of markedness. In terms of structural markedness, possessive NPs are indeed at least as phonologically and graphematically complex as the-NPs. For German Mann ‘man’ and English woman as two representative examples, this is also confirmed by distributional markedness. Because of this markedness characterization, 47 German possessive pronouns mein, dein, sein, ihr, unser, euer; definite article der, die, das. English possessive pronouns my, your, his, her, its, our, their; definite article the. The only exceptions are English my that is graphematically less complex than the (two letters), although phonologically more complex (diphthong), and German ihr that is phonologically less complex than the masculine and neuter definite articles der, das. 48 For persons, the use of the possessive is normally inapplicable unless a social relationship is meant, not a proper possession. English woman does not seems to be an appropriate head of possessive NPs at all, and