In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as ''unmarked''; the other, secondary one is ''marked''. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
In linguistics, markedness can apply to, among others,
phonological,
grammatical, and
semantic
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
oppositions, defining them in terms of marked and unmarked oppositions, such as ''honest'' (unmarked) vs. ''dishonest'' (marked). Marking may be purely semantic, or may be realized as extra morphology. The term derives from the marking of a grammatical role with a suffix or another element, and has been extended to situations where there is no morphological distinction.
In
social science
Social science (often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the ...
s more broadly, markedness is, among other things, used to distinguish two meanings of the same term, where one is common usage (unmarked sense) and the other is specialized to a certain cultural context (marked sense).
In
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
, the social science concept of markedness is quantified as a measure of how much one variable is marked as a predictor or possible cause of another, and is also known as (deltaP) in simple two-choice cases. See
confusion matrix for more details.
Marked and unmarked word pairs
In terms of lexical opposites, a marked form is a non-basic one, often one with
inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
al or
derivational endings. Thus, a morphologically negative word form is marked as opposed to a positive one: ''happy''/''unhappy'', ''honest''/''dishonest'', ''fair''/''unfair'', ''clean''/''unclean'', and so forth. Similarly, unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms: ''lion''/''lioness'', ''host''/''hostess'', ''automobile''/''automobiles'', ''child''/''children''. An unmarked form is also a default form. For example, the unmarked ''lion'' can refer to a male or female, while ''lioness'' is marked because it can refer only to females.
The default nature allows unmarked lexical forms to be identified even when the opposites are not morphologically related. In the pairs ''old''/''young'', ''big''/''little'', ''happy''/''sad'', ''clean''/''dirty'', the first term of each pair is taken as unmarked because it occurs generally in questions. For example, English speakers typically ask how old someone is; use of the marked term (''how young are you?'') would presuppose youth.
Background in Prague School
While the idea of linguistic asymmetry predated the actual coining of the terms ''marked'' and ''unmarked'', the modern concept of markedness originated in the
Prague School
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and ...
structuralism
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns t ...
of
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...
and
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy ( ; 16 April 1890 – 25 June 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morpho ...
as a means of characterizing binary oppositions.
Both sound and meaning were analyzed into systems of binary distinctive features.
Edwin Battistella wrote: "Binarism suggests symmetry and equivalence in
linguistic analysis; markedness adds the idea of hierarchy." Trubetzkoy and Jakobson analyzed phonological oppositions such as nasal versus non-nasal as defined as the presence versus the absence of nasality; the presence of the feature,
nasality, was marked; its absence, non-nasality, was unmarked. For Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, binary phonological features formed part of a universal feature alphabet applicable to all languages. In his 1932 article "Structure of the Russian Verb", Jakobson extended the concept to grammatical meanings in which the marked element "announces the existence of
ome meaningA" while the unmarked element "does not announce the existence of A, i.e., does not state whether A is present or not". Forty years later, Jakobson described language by saying that "every single constituent of a linguistic system is built on an opposition of two logical contradictories: the presence of an attribute ('markedness') in contraposition to its absence ('unmarkedness')."
In his 1941 ''Child Language, Aphasia, and Universals of Language'', Jakobson suggested that phonological markedness played a role in
language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...
and
loss. Drawing on existing studies of acquisition and
aphasia
Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aph ...
, Jakobson suggested a mirror-image relationship determined by a universal feature hierarchy of marked and unmarked oppositions. Today many still see Jakobson's theory of phonological acquisition as identifying useful tendencies.
Jakobsonian tradition
The work of Cornelius van Schooneveld,
Edna Andrews, Rodney Sangster, Yishai Tobin and others on 'semantic invariance' (different general meanings reflected in the contextual specific meanings of features) has further developed the
semantic analysis of grammatical items in terms of marked and unmarked features. Other semiotically-oriented work has investigated the isomorphism of form and meaning with less emphasis on invariance, including the efforts of Henning Andersen, Michael Shapiro, and Edwin Battistella. Shapiro and Andrews have especially made connections between the semiotic of
C. S. Peirce and markedness, treating it "as species of interpretant" in Peirce's sign–object–interpretant triad.
Functional linguists such as
Talmy Givón have suggested that markedness is related to
cognitive complexity—"in terms of attention, mental effort or processing time". Linguistic 'naturalists' view markedness relations in terms of the ways in which extralinguistic principles of perceptibility and psychological efficiency determine what is natural in language. Willi Mayerthaler, another linguist, for example, defines unmarked categories as those "in agreement with the typical attributes of the speaker".
Cultural markedness and informedness
Since a main component of markedness is the information content and information value of an element, some studies have taken markedness as an encoding of that which is unusual or informative, and this is reflected in formal probabilistic definitions of markedness and
informedness that, for dichotomous problems, correspond to the chance-correct unidirectional components of the
Matthews correlation coefficient known as Δp and Δp'.
Conceptual familiarity with cultural norms provided by familiar categories creates a ground against which marked categories provide a figure, opening the way for markedness to be applied to cultural and social categorization.
As early as the 1930s Jakobson had already suggested applying markedness to all oppositions, explicitly mentioning such pairs as life/death, liberty/bondage, sin/virtue, and holiday/working day. Linda Waugh extended this to oppositions like male/female, white/black, sighted/blind, hearing/deaf, heterosexual/homosexual, right/left, fertility/barrenness, clothed/nude, and spoken language/written language. Battistella expanded this with the demonstration of how cultures align markedness values to create cohesive symbol systems, illustrating with examples based on
Rodney Needham's work. Other work has applied markedness to stylistics, music, and myth.
Local markedness and markedness reversals
Markedness depends on
context. What is more marked in some general contexts may be less marked in other local contexts. Thus, "ant" is less marked than "ants" on the morphological level, but on the semantic (and frequency) levels it may be more marked since ants are more often encountered many at once than one at a time. Often a more general markedness relation may be reversed in a particular context. Thus, voicelessness of
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
s is typically unmarked. But between
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s or in the neighborhood of voiced consonants, voicing may be the expected or unmarked value.
Reversal is reflected in certain
West Frisian words' plural and singular forms: In West Frisian, nouns with irregular singular-plural stem variations are undergoing regularization. Usually this means that the plural is reformed to be a regular form of the singular:
* Old paradigm: "koal" (coal), "kwallen" (coals) → regularized forms: "Koal" (coal), "Koalen" (coals).
However, a number of words instead reform the singular by extending the form of the plural:
* Old paradigm: "earm" (arm), "jermen" (arms) → regularized forms: "jerm" (arm), "jermen" (arms)
The common feature of the nouns that regularize the singular to match the plural is that they occur more often in pairs or groups than singly; they are said to be semantically (but not morphologically) locally unmarked in the plural.
Universals and frequency
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...
's 1966 book ''Language Universals'' was an influential application of markedness to typological linguistics and a break from the tradition of Jakobson and Trubetzkoy. Greenberg took frequency to be the primary determining factor of markedness in grammar and suggested that unmarked categories could be determined by "the frequency of association of things in the real world".
Greenberg also applied frequency cross-linguistically, suggesting that unmarked categories would be those that are unmarked in a wide number of languages. However, critics have argued that frequency is problematic because categories that are cross-linguistically infrequent may have a high distribution in a particular language.
More recently the insights related to frequency have been formalized as chance-corrected conditional probabilities, with
Informedness (Δp') and Markedness (Δp) corresponding to the different directions of prediction in human association research (binary associations or distinctions)
and more generally (including features with more than two distinctions).
Universals have also been connected to
implicational laws. This entails that a category is taken as marked if every language that has the marked category also has the unmarked one but not vice versa.
Diagnostics
Markedness has been extended and reshaped over the past century and reflects a range of loosely connected theoretical approaches. From emerging in the analysis of binary oppositions, it has become a global semiotic principle, a means of encoding naturalness and language universals, and a terminology for studying defaults and preferences in language acquisition. What connects various approaches is a concern for the evaluation of linguistic structure, though the details of how markedness is determined and what its implications and diagnostics are varies widely. Other approaches to universal markedness relations focus on functional economic and iconic motivations, tying recurring symmetries to properties of communication channels and communication events. Croft (1990), for example, notes that asymmetries among linguistic elements may be explainable in terms economy of form, in terms of iconism between the structure of language and conceptualization of the world.
In generative grammar
Markedness entered generative linguistic theory through
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
and
Morris Halle's ''
The Sound Pattern of English''. For Chomsky and Halle, phonological features went beyond a universal phonetic vocabulary to encompass an 'evaluation metric', a means of selecting the most highly valued adequate grammar. In ''The Sound Pattern of English'', the value of a grammar was the inverse of the number of features required in that grammar. However, Chomsky and Halle realized that their initial approach to phonological features made implausible rules and segment inventories as highly valued as natural ones. The unmarked value of a feature was cost-free with respect to the evaluation metric, while the marked feature values were counted by the metric. Segment inventories could also be evaluated according to the number of marked features. However, the use of phonological markedness as part of the evaluation metric was never able to fully account for the fact that some features are more likely than others or for the fact that phonological systems must have a certain minimal complexity and symmetry.
In
generative syntax
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...
, markedness as feature-evaluation did not receive the same attention that it did in phonology. Chomsky came to view unmarked properties as an innate preference structure based first in constraints and later in parameters of
universal grammar. In their 1977 article "Filters and Control", Chomsky and
Howard Lasnik extended this to view markedness as part of a theory of 'core grammar':
A few years later, Chomsky describes it thus:
Some generative researchers have applied markedness to
second-language acquisition theory, treating it as an inherent learning hierarchy which reflects the sequence in which constructions are acquired, the difficulty of acquiring certain constructions, and the transferability of rules across languages. More recently,
optimality theory
Optimality theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which ty ...
approaches emerging in the 1990s have incorporated markedness in the ranking of constraints.
[Archangeli 1997.]
See also
*
Inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
*
Lemma (morphology)
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of th ...
*
Lexeme
A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms ta ...
*
Male as norm
*
Marker (linguistics)
*
Matthews correlation coefficient
*
Null morpheme
*
Other (philosophy)
In philosophy, the Other is a fundamental concept referring to anyone or anything perceived as distinct or different from oneself. This distinction is crucial for understanding how individuals construct their own identities, as the encounter wit ...
*
Underlying representation
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any ph ...
References
Further reading
*Andersen, Henning 1989 "Markedness—The First 150 Years", In ''Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
*Andrews, Edna 1990 ''Markedness Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language'', Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
*Archangeli, Diana 1997 "Optimality Theory: An Introduction to Linguistics in the 1990s", In ''Optimality Theory: An Overview''. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
*Battistella, Edwin 1990 ''Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language'', Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
*Battistella, Edwin 1996 ''The Logic of Markedness'', New York: Oxford University Press.
*Chandler, Daniel 2002/2007 ''Semiotics: The Basics'', London: Routledge.
*Chandler, Daniel 2005 Entry on markedness. In John Protevi (ed.) (2005) ''Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy'', Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
*Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris 1968 ''The Sound Pattern of English'', New York: Harper and Row.
*Greenberg, Joseph ''Language Universals'', The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
*Trask, R. L. 1999 ''Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics'', London and New York: Routledge.
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