A Study On The Application Of Salience Principle To English Writing

The development of modern cognitive linguistics offers new perspectives on language learning and research. As one of important approaches, salience principle makes people realize the interferences in cognitive linguistics on human being's thoughts in the process of writing. This thesis studies the application of salience principle to English writing.Salience principle mainly refers to figure-ground relation. When people perceive the world, the figure attracts more attention than the ground. Later, Langacker develops salience further into two groups:profile and base, trajector and landmark.On the basis of the theoretical framework, the author of the present research collects 300 pieces of college students'English writing, and analyzes them on the view of salience. According to the analysis, the author finds that many mistakes and inappropriateness in the students writing are due to the salience mistakes. The students are likely to make lexical, syntactical and discourse mistakes related to salience. Lexically, inappropriate words are used to express ideas; syntactically, wrong sentence structure appears as the salient information is misplaced; and in discourse, disorganized salience in context occurs very often. Therefore, the teachers should provide effective instructions to the students in writing classes, draw their attention to salience in word selection, choice of syntactical structures and discourse cohesion. English writing is important to Chinese students, and applying the salience principle to English writing would benefit the students a lot in helping them improve their writing abilities.