Blurb:

Chapter 9, Salience, context, and common ground, discusses the nature of salience and its relationship to context and common ground. The chapter examines the factors that correlate with salience. Salience correlates with attention and memory access, and plays a role in information packaging of utterances in a dialogue. The information status of the discourse referents in turn corelates with accessibility and salience. A special significance is reserved for salience in a consideration of the dynamics of the construction and maintenance of common ground, and the management of knowledge and information flow. It is recognised that some knowledge can become readily available in cognition, more so than other elements of knowledge, in the communicative process. Salience can occur for both a speaker and a hearer, and when convergence occurs for both, the salient ‘thing’, enters common ground and the co-construction of common ground is established. Salience therefore selects contending entities of various kinds as candidates for inclusion into common ground.