On discourse-semantic prominence, syntactic prominence, and prominence of expression: the case of Movima

International audienceThis study investigates the relationship between three types of linguistic prominence. The first type, discourse-semantic prominence, encompasses features pertaining to a discourse referent at a given moment, like topicality, person, animacy, or agentivity. The second type, syntactic prominence, is reflected by syntactic privileges of an argument. The third type, prominence of linguistic expression, occurs when a linguistic unit stands out through e.g. length and complexity. Cross-linguistically, a discourse-semantically prominent referent tends to be syntactically prominent but is encoded by a nonprominent linguistic expression (e.g. an unstressed pronoun). In Movima (isolate, Bolivia), a language with a direct-inverse system, the way the two arguments of a transitive clause are encoded depends on the relative discourse-semantic prominence of their referents. Interestingly, the argument representing the less prominent referent is syntactically privileged, having access to extraction constructions. This unexpected mismatch between discourse-semantic and syntactic prominence can be explained by the fact that extraction creates a prominent form of linguistic expression, which therefore applies more naturally to an argument with a discourse-semantically nonprominent referent. The Movima findings thus show that discourse-semantic and syntactic prominence do not necessarily correlate, while supporting the assumption that discourse-semantic prominence universally correlates with low prominence of expression