Noncompositional

The other day I was attending a talk by Carlos Gussenhoven on the use of intonational features to communicate paralinguistic meaning. During the talk he was discussing the effect of pitch range on English and Dutch listeners’ perceptions of attitude (friendly, mean, off-putting, etc.). In the course of the explanation, he said (paraphrasing)

This distinction is quite salient, while this one is more subtle.

(Yes, he’s a non-native speaker, but that’s fine, since it made total sense to me) This caught my ear, because I was accustomed to thinking that “more (of a)” was used to make subtle distinctions on a scale, or perhaps even across (subtly) different scales. Consider this is a stew, while this is more of a soup, or perhaps your teacher is despotic, but mine is more stubborn. I also thought that salient and subtle were on opposite ends of some “obviousness” scale. But, as always, I realized (after talking it through with a colleague) that it’s more complicated.

There are at least two scales involved: importance and obviousness. Importance is how much attention should be paid or significance be placed on a particular phenomenon, and obviousness is how hard it is to notice the existence of such a phenomenon (and there may be another factor, namely how difficult it is to determine the importance given the observation; but I’ll ignore that for now). I made a simple chart that hopefully demonstrates the interaction of these two scales.

What does it mean? Well, I have two scales, one running across the top (obviousness), and one across the side (importance, significance). The terms in [brackets] take some narrow range of values on one scale, but are insensitive to the other scale. Thus, something judged as trivial may be hard or easy to notice, and something obvious may be either important or trivial. The two terms salient and subtle do not range over any particular scale, but have particular (small ranges of) values on both scales. Things that are salient or subtle are generally important or “good to notice,” though one is easier to notice and one is hard. Let’s see some (made-up) examples:

• You may think it’s imperceptible, but it’s actually quite obvious (in the right context).
• You may think it’s important, but it’s really totally meaningless/trivial.
• You may think it’s a subtle difference, but it’s really very salient (in the right context).
• #You may think it’s imperceptible, but it’s actually quite important/trivial.
• #You may think it’s obvious, but it’s really quite important/trivial.
• #You may think it’s important/trivial, but it’s actually quite imperceptible.

The first three are fine, because they contrast two points on one scale (though the terms also range across another scale). The second three are odd because they try to set up a contrast between two points on two different scales where no contrast necessarily exists. That is, there is no reason to automatically think that something has some degree of importance given how obvious it is. Okay, depending on the person there may well be good reasons. But if you’ve been trained to think that obviousness is not (positively) correlated with importance, then these should sound odd.

Now the subtle/salient contrast makes sense: they are two terms that occupy two positions on a scale of obviousness, but both are valued “high” in importance. Now try these:

• You may think it’s trivial, but it’s actually quite salient.
• You may think it’s trivial, but it’s actually quite subtle.

For me, these are a little odd, but only a little. The oddness, if we can account for it with the scale interaction, comes from the fact that you’re contrasting the value of one attribute (importance) and additionally assigning a value on another scale (obviousness) that was not under consideration. Further, the second sentence is even more odd for me, though this may reveal some underlying bias I have about important things being more obvious (and thus subtleness is highly “marked,” or unexpected). Now, the other way?

• You may think it’s salient, but it’s actually quite trivial/meaningless.
• You may think it’s subtle, but it’s actually quite trivial/meaningless.

Both seem good (though odd for the value-assigning reason above). I can’t tell if one seems more odd than the other, though. I think the second one is better. In the second one, if I go with my hard-to-notice = unimportant bias, then the goodness is explained — I’m contrasting importance, with the obviousness “assumed.” The first one is then odder, because I’m having to switch both attributes: important to not important, and obviousness to (presumed) imperceptibility.