While much progress has been made in empirically mapping and analysing a variety of interest group activities in the last decade, less attention has been devoted to conceptual work that clearly defines and distinguishes different forms of policy engagement. This article contributes to this endeavour by developing a theoretical framework that explicitly links currently available measures of the policy engagement of groups to the distinct concepts of group involvement, access and prominence. It argues that greater conceptual clarity will lead to better accumulation of knowledge in the sub‐field and a better understanding of the role of interest groups in political systems.

There has been considerable debate as to whether word-level metrical prominence asymmetries are a universal feature of languages. African tone languages have been at the heart of this debate, as many of these languages do not show clear phonetic evidence of lexical stress. This article explores metrical prominence asymmetries in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language, by examining such asymmetries through the lens of speech timing. Forged within a dynamical model of metrical structure, a metronome-based phrase-repetition task known as SPEECH CYCLING is used to investigate the relative timing of syllables hypothesized to be metrically prominent and metrically weak. Previous research using the task has shown that metrically prominent syllables are attracted to certain relative positions within a repetition cycle. Results of two experiments show that foot heads in Medʉmba also show this behavior, supporting their status as metrically prominent. These results suggest that true metrical prominence asymmetries exist in a broader range of languages than previously thought, and that relative timing serves as an important unifying property of metrical structure crosslinguistically.

One of the key elements of constraint-based formalisms is their ability to derive a variety of effects from the interaction of general constraints. As for vowel harmony, one persistent question within Optimality Theory is how to encode directionality - directly through directional harmony-driving constraints, or indirectly through asymmetric prominence patterns. This paper presents a typologically unusual case of progressive harmony triggered by prefixes in Tutrugbu. We compare analyzing harmony as purely progressive in a direct sense with an indirect analysis that motivates harmony from initial-syllable prominence. Based on both language-internal and typological evidence, we argue that the prominence-based analysis is superior. We generalize to suggest that progressive harmony should always be reducible to independent factors, and as a result, formalized indirectly through prominence.

This article studies the relationship between prosody and desemanticization in grammaticalization processes by means of a well-described phenomenon, the grammaticalization of ‘type’ nouns (type, kind, sort) in present-day English. To this end, 1,155 tokens of the three nouns, retrieved from the ICE-GB corpus, were semantically classified and prosodically analyzed. Our main result is that different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization. This result provides evidence that desemanticization and erosion proceed hand in hand. Their parallel development is attributed to the demands of iconicity rather than to frequency effects.

It has been shown in the literature that the preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, found in a number of languages (especially verb-/head-final ones), can result from different syntactic configurations. In some languages (e.g., in Hungarian), immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement). In others (e.g., in Turkish), preverbal foci remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement), to allow for the focus–verb adjacency. We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent but differ in the directionality of alignment (right or left). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping. We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.

Prosody and gesture are two known cues for expressing information structure by emphasising new or important elements in spoken discourse while attenuating given information. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning mapping to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. This study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to differentiate levels of givenness.

Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 native French speakers were video-recorded during a short spontaneous narrative task. Participants’ oral productions were annotated for information status, perceived prominence, pitch accents, and head gesture types. Results show that given information in French is multimodally less marked than new-er information and is accordingly perceived as less prominent. Our findings indicate that Catalan learners of French mark given information more frequently than native speakers and may transfer their use of low pitch accents to their second language (L2). The data also show that the use of head gestures depends on the presence of prosodic marking, calling into question the assumption that prosody and gesture have balanced functional roles. Finally, the type of head gesture does not appear to play a significant role in marking information status.

This study investigates interactions among relative syllabic prominence, initial geminates (IGs), and prosodic boundaries in Pattani Malay (PM) against a background of previous analyses claiming that IGs are moraic and trigger a ‘stress shift’ or the linking of a pitch accent to the initial syllable. We conducted an acoustic study with fourteen PM speakers, producing singleton–IG minimal pairs in naturalistic sentences. Our results show that the presence of IGs is not associated with the hypothesized phonological changes. Instead, it is associated with moderate increases in the duration of initial syllables, the intensity of the initial syllable vowels, and the f0 of the initial and final syllable vowels. On the other hand, the presence of a phrase-final prosodic boundary correlates with more drastic changes: in phrase-final position, final syllables exhibit final lengthening and falling contours of f0 and intensity, while, in the phrase-medial position, no lengthening is observed and f0 contours are rising. Furthermore, the effects of IGs are strongest in the phrase-final position, suggesting interactions between IGs and prosodic boundaries. Taken together, results cast doubts on the claim that IGs are moraic and associated with categorical differences in syllabic prominence profiles in PM and show that IG effects are modulated by prosodic boundaries.

People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominentattribute — the prominence effect. We studied the effect of prominence inhealth care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to healthwould trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individualsthemselves evaluated different treatment options as equally good. We conductedpre-registered experiments with a diverse Swedish sample and a sample ofinternational experts on priority setting in health care (n = 1348).Participants, acting in the role of policy makers, revealed their valuation fordifferent medical treatments in hypothetical scenarios. Participants weresystematically inconsistent between preferences expressed through evaluation ina matching task and preferences expressed through choice. In line with ourhypothesis, a large proportion of participants (General population: 92%, Experts84% of all choices) chose treatment options that were better on the healthdimension (lower health risk) despite having previously expressed indifferencebetween those options and others that were better on the cost dimension. Thus,we find strong evidence of a prominence effect in health-care priority setting.Our findings provide a psychological explanation for why opportunity costs(i.e., the value of choices not exercised) are neglected in health care prioritysetting.

In ten studies (N = 9187), I systematically investigated the direction and sizeof seven helping effects (the identifiable-victim effect, proportion dominanceeffect, ingroup effect, existence effect, innocence effect, age effect andgender effect). All effects were tested in three decision modes (separateevaluation, joint evaluation and forced choice), and in their weak form (equalefficiency), or strong form (unequal efficiency). Participants read about one,or two, medical help projects and rated the attractiveness of and allocatedresources to the project/projects, or choose which project to implement. Theresults show that the included help-situation attributes vary in their: (1)Evaluability – e.g., rescue proportion is the easiest to evaluate inseparate evaluation. (2) Justifiability – e.g., people prefer to savefewer lives now rather than more lives in the future, but not fewer identifiedlives rather than more statistical lives. (3) Prominence – e.g., peopleexpress a preference to help females, but only when forced to choose.

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the significance of mountains in siting Greek cult. Mountains were where the gods preferred to make contact and there people constructed sanctuaries to inspire intervention. Greece is a land full of mountains, but we lack insight on the ancient Greeks’ view—what visible and topographic characteristics made particular mountains ideal places for worship over others, and whether worshiper preferences ever changed. This article describes a data collection and analysis methodology for landscapes where visualscape was a significant factor in situating culturally significant activities. Using a big-data approach, four geospatial analyses are applied to every cultic place in the Peloponnesian regions of the Argolid and Messenia, spanning 2800–146 BC. The fully described methodology combines a number of experiences—looking out, looking toward, and climbing up—and measures how these change through time. The result is an active historic model of Greek religious landscape, describing how individuals moved, saw, and integrated the built and natural world in different ways. Applied elsewhere, and even on nonreligious locales, this is a replicable mode for treating the natural landscape as an artifact of human decision: as a space impacting the siting of meaningful locales through history.