Skip to main content

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1371538
This article is part of the Research Topic Animacy in Cognition: Effects, Mechanisms, and Theories View all 12 articles

Zooming in and out of semantics: proximal-distal construal levels and prominence hierarchies

Provisionally accepted
Bruno Laeng Bruno Laeng 1*Marit Lobben Marit Lobben 2
  • 1 University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
  • 2 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Oslo, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    We argue that the "Prominence Hierarchy" within linguistics can be subsumed under the "Construal Level Theory" within psychology and that a wide spectrum of grammatical phenomena, ranging from case assignment to number, definiteness, verbal agreement, voice, direct/inverse morphology, and syntactic word-order respond to Prominence Hierarchies (PH), or semantic scales. In fact, the field of prominence hierarchies, as expressed through the languages of the world, continues to be riddled with riddles. We identify a set of conundrums: A) vantage point and animacy, B) individuation and narrow reference phenomena, C) fronting mechanisms, D) abstraction, and E) cultural variance and flexibility. We here propose an account for the existence of these hierarchies and their pervasive effects on grammar by relying on psychological Construal Level Theory (CLT). We suggest that both PH and CLT structure the external world according to proximity or distance from the 'Me, Here and Now' (MHN) perspective. In language, MHN has the effect of structuring grammars; in cognition, it structures our lives, our preferences, and choices.

    Keywords: Prominence hierarchies, Construal Level Theory (CLT), Split ergativity, Differential Object Marking (DOM), Nominal classification, ethnosyntax, Culture-Language Interpretive Matrix, Abstraction processes

    Received: 16 Jan 2024; Accepted: 23 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Laeng and Lobben. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Bruno Laeng, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.