The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 16. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 120 HANS-JÖRG SCHMID The second usage of the notion of salience ontological salience is not related to temporary activation states of concepts but to more or less stable properties of entities in the world. The idea is that by virtue of their very nature some entities are better qualified to attract our attention than others and are thus more salient in this sense. The obvious link between ontological salience and cognitive salience is that mental concepts of salient entities have a better chance of entering our focus of attention. As a consequence ontologically salient entities are more likely to evoke corresponding cognitively salient concepts than ontologically nonsalient ones. For example a dog has a better attention-attracting potential than the field over which it is running. Therefore it is likely that observers of the scene will be more aware of the dog and its actions than of the field. The notion of salience may thus denote both a temporary activation state of mental concepts cognitive salience and an inherent and consequently more or less permanent property of entities in the real world ontological salience . It follows from these definitions that there is a two-way relationship between salience and entrenchment. On the one hand ontologically salient entities attract our attention more frequently than nonsalient ones. As a result cognitive events related to the processing of ontologically salient entities will occur more frequently and lead to an earlier entrenchment of corresponding cognitive units or concepts. This is perhaps most noticeable in the early stages of language acquisition when active movable or otherwise interesting and therefore salient entities such as people animals or colorful and noisy toys which have a relatively high potential of attracting children s attention stand a better chance of early entrenchment as cognitive units than less salient entities such as walls or carpets. It must be emphasized however that there is no one-to-one
