Title: A Contrastive Study of the Prominence View and the Figure-Ground Theory

Abstract: The prominence view and the figure-ground theory are related to each other because they both involve perceptual relations. However, they are not equal, and this results in their difference in superiority. The prominence view is a general principle of cognition and a basic way of thinking, and it is superior to the figure-ground theory in syntactic analysis for being economical in theory and capable of simplifying the analyzing process and providing systematic and reasonable explanations to related syntactic problems. The figure-ground theory, which has developed from the description of the perceptional relation between the two parts in the perceptional field, can very well illustrate the prominence relation between the things involved in the prominence view, but it is limited in its application in syntactic analysis because of the difficulty in determining figure and ground and the irreversibility of the perceptional relation between figure and ground.

Keywords: prominence view, figure-ground theory, relation, syntactic analysis, advantage and disadvantage

Author: Yuxiang Qin, Professor, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China; Dan Zhao, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.