prominence scales

Prominence, a.k.a discourse saliency, topicality, etc. has been presented as a form of implicational scales; cf. Giv6n 1975; Silverstein 1976; Comrie 1989; Haspelmath 2007

Scales of prominence: items to the left is more prominent than one to the right.

a. Animacy: human> (non-human) animate> inanimate

b. Thematicity: controller > controlled (including causer > causee)

c. Referentiality:

  proper noun > definite NP > indefinite-specific NP > indefinite-non-specific NP

d. Anaphoricity: personal pronoun > noun

e. Person: first/ second person > third person

 - taken from Konig and Heine (2010), !Xun, Studies in ditransitive constructions, Malchukov, Haspelmath and Comrie eds.