1 The dynamic grammar and socio-pragmatics of prominence in Balinese I Wayan Arka The Australian National University/Udayana University 1 Introduction * Prominence plays a crucial role in linguistic description, typology and theory. Its central tenet is the relational asymmetry of units in a given structure. It entails at least two irreversible elements in a structured set (Di Sciullo 2005xv-xvi), with one of the elements ‘standing out’ or ‘more prominent’ than the other (Himmelmann and Primus 2015). Prominence constraints have been of interest across different theoretical frameworks, with investigation across domains from phonology to morphology-syntax, and discourse pragmatics (cf. Di Sciullo 2005, 2003, Barrie 2011, Latrouite 2011, among others). In descriptive linguistics and language typology, analytical descriptions also appeal to the notion of the prominence of different kinds: the grammatical hierarchy of subject > object > oblique 1 (Keenan and Comrie 1977: among others, Bresnan 2001), the agentivity and animacy hierarchy (Alsina and Mchombo 1990, among others, Riesberg and Primus 2015, Riesberg, Malcher, and Himmelmann 2019) and the thematic/semantic role hierarchy of agent > beneficiary > goal > instrument> patient/ theme > locative (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989, and the referenences therein). This paper examines the lexico-grammar and socio-pragmatics of prominence and alternating systems in Balinese from a lexical-functional perspective. 2 It assumes a modular LFG-like parallel-based model with discrete sub-modules/layers that includes linear order and structural constituency, grammatical function/relation structure and argument structure (Bresnan et al. 2015, Dalrymple, Lowe, and Mycock 2019). Each layer has its own prominence and is related to other layers by principled linking or correspondence. The dynamics of prominence interactions will be examined in the broader context of social deixis of speech levels, including how prominence plays out at the interfaces of linguistic domains in Balinese. The key questions this paper addresses include the following: (i) does evidence exist for patterns of prominence in Balinese and if so, in what areas of grammar and/or social-discourse-pragmatics?; (ii) are different kinds of prominence equally or differently weighted in the interaction?; and (iii) how are prominence competitions regulated or resolved? This paper is the first integrated analysis that builds on previous research in Balinese (Arka 2003a, 2005, 2014, 2019, Artawa 1994, Pastika 1999) to address these three questions explicitly. This paper is structured as follows. By way of background, a brief typological overview of Balinese morphosyntax in the context of prominence is given in section 2. Section 3 is devoted to a discussion of all the prominence layers in Balinese. The * I thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and also Charbel El-Khaissi for editing the paper. 1 Where the notation “… > …” means “ … more prominent than …’. 2 There are two broad Balinese dialects called Plain Balinese and Mountain Balinese. Their differences include, but are not limited to, their pronominal systems whereby Mountain Balinese retains the Austronesian first and second pronouns, aku and engko (see Sedeng, 2007; Arka and Sedeng, 2018). Most examples in this paper are in Plain Balinese.