Linguistic prominence as a continuum

Prominence typology revisited on grounds of feature inheritance

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the discrepancy in the classification of Mandarin Chinese in different prominence typologies, the present paper deals with the nature of linguistic prominence. Assuming a correlation between feature inheritance and prominence in grammatical or discursive relations, it is noted that Spanish, a language with discourse-prominent features, may not always appeal to discoursefeature inheritance, which suggests that linguistic prominence, instead of being discrete, may be characterized by a continuous nature. This leads the present paper to propose the hypothesis of the Prominence Continuum, and to argue that Mandarin Chinese has an intermediate level of discourse prominence, which may provide a natural and straightforward explanation for the aforementioned discrepancy in the classification of Mandarin Chinese. To confirm the validity of this hypothesis, this paper analyses the positions of different types of topics in Mandarin Chinese, and it is shown that while some of them occupy [Spec,CP], the others undergo A-movement to [Spec,TP]; this implies the coexistence of inheritance from C to T and retainment in C of the discourse features in this language, as expected for a language claimed to have an intermediate level of discourse prominence.