Why do we say what we say the way we say it?

This paper seeks answer to the question why exactly we say what we say the way we say it. Although Giora (1997, 2003) argued that cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, play the most important role both in production and comprehension of language, most attention in pragmatics research has been focused on comprehension rather than production. This paper claims that salience plays as important a role in language production as in comprehension, and discusses how salience of an entity can be interpreted as a measure of how well an entity stands out from other entities and biases the preference of the individual in selecting words, expressions, and complex constructs in the process of communication. It is argued that there is a unique interplay between linguistic salience and perceptual salience both in production and comprehension. The role of perceptual and linguistic salience involves a relation between prominence of entities in a ranking, and preference of a choice among alternatives. From the perspective of interlocutors, three theoretically significant categories are distinguished: inherent salience, collective salience, and emergent situational salience. Inherent salience is largely equivalent to cognitive status. It is characterized as a natural built-in preference in the general conceptual and linguistic knowledge of the speaker, which has developed as a result of prior experience with the use of lexical items and situations, and changes both diachronically and synchronically. Inherent salience is affected by collective salience and emergent situational salience. Collective salience is shared with the members of a speech community, and changes diachronically. Emergent situational salience that changes synchronically refers to the salience of specific objects or linguistic elements in the context of language production and comprehension, and may accrue through such determinants as vividness, speaker motivation and recency of mention. In an actual situational context inherent, individual salience is affected and shaped both by collective and situational salience. When the speaker is faced with the choice of a word or an expression, a ranking of the available choices is obtained on the basis of the degree of salience of entities in the generation context. The word or phrase then is selected for utterance on the basis of maximum salience. This paper argues that inherent salience is dominated by linguistic salience, while emergent situational salience is usually governed by perceptual salience. As stated above salience is equally important both in production and comprehension. However, the focus of this paper will mainly be on speaker production because this issue has received less attention so far. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.