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

AbstractA wide spectre 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. Despite numerous linguistic-specific and cognitive explanations have been proposed since the topic was first introduced nearly fifty years ago, it remains unexplained why these hierarchies exist and continue to have pervasive effects on grammar. The field of prominence hierarchies as expressed through the languages of the world continues to be riddled with riddles. Under the five headings A) individuation and narrow reference phenomena, B) fronting mechanisms, C) the prominence of speech act participants, D) cultural variance and flexibility, and E) abstraction, we identify a set of unsolved mysteries, or conundrums, that require an explanation: 1) If animacy underlies PH, why can definiteness and specificity independently cause PH effects? 2) Why is individuation more pertinent for categories high up in the PH? 3) Why are personal names and kinship terms ranked above the category of humans, when they too reference humans? 4) How can one ‘empathise with’ an inanimate object when it is a topic, but not when the same referent is a regular direct object? 5) Why are topics given special priority, even when their referents are inherently low ranked? 6) Why can differentially marked objects be subjects of passive constructions when the same oblique cases in primary oblique functions cannot? 7) Why are question words and relative pronouns sensitive to animacy? 8) Why are first person pronouns, or sometimes first and second persons – the ‘speech-act participants’ – given special priority? 9) Why are abstract concepts always ranked the lowest? And finally, two related issues are discussed as the last conundrum: 10) Why do grammars rank some groups of humans as lower when these have a particular gender or ethnicity, and why are some animals ranked higher when they are domestic than wild, even if they belong to the same species? We attempt to resolve these conundrums with reference to the psychological Construal Level Theory (CLT) by suggesting 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, MHN structures our lives, our preferences, and choices. Both, however, reflect a fundamental way in which the human mind works.