Languages & Linguistics
Marked and Unmarked Terms
Marked and unmarked terms are linguistic concepts that refer to the degree of specificity or emphasis that a word or phrase carries in a given context. Marked terms are those that carry a more specific or emphasized meaning, while unmarked terms are more general or neutral. These concepts are important in understanding how language reflects and reinforces social and cultural norms.
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5 Key excerpts on "Marked and Unmarked Terms"
eBook - PDF- Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
However, more recent work has shown that the separation of mark and feature allows for either pole of an opposi-tion to be marked, both across languages and within a language, thus allowing for marked-ness reversals. For example, across lan-guages, masculine is the unmarked gender of nouns in familiar European languages, but feminine is the unmarked gender in some Ir-oquian languages. Within a language, singu-lar is the unmarked number in nouns in Eng-lish, but plural is the unmarked number in the pronominal opposition we I , since the unmarked we can refer not only to more than one person but also to one person alone (the royal or editorial we ), whereas the singular I can only refer to one person. The same is true for many, or perhaps all, inflectional cate-gories. 5.4. Other uses of the term markedness Because markedness is correlated with issues of frequency, regularity, normality, and so forth, marked has also come to mean strange, deviant, unusual, unexpected in a given context, that is, stylistically marked, e.g., the use of the present to refer to the past as in the historical present (Eng. and just as I was about to cross the street, John comes up to me and says… ) is a stylistically marked us-age of the unmarked term. The use of an un-marked category may also be pragmatically marked. For example, in French, the pro-noun vous is unmarked vs. tu (both mean ‘you’) because tu means that the speaker is in a close relation of solidarity with the ad-dressee, whereas vous is used in all other cases. The use of vous is pragmatically un-marked when addressed to a stranger but un-expected (pragmatically marked it may be ironic or pejorative or teasing) when used with a friend. In like fashion, categories may be sociolinguistically/socioculturally marked (e.g., English non-standard throwed is mark-ed vs. standard threw ). 6. Range of application of markedness These last examples take us far from the orig-inal insight with which we started.
eBook - PDF- Olga Miseska Tomic(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The unmarked unit contains no positive statement with respect to the specific item of information involved, i. e., it remains uncommitted... The alternatives presence of specific information vs. absence of specific information being only two, we are necessarily dealing with binary oppositions. Van Schooneveld's reasoning that the recurring semantic relations to be discovered among the morphemes of a given language are based on markedness, and that these relations are consequently by necessity binary, manipulates semantic theory into a vicious circle, which can be solved only if the binary nature of the assumed correlations is investigated separately from the investigation of markedness, and both are based on a thorough investigation of the meaning of each unit. Due to lack of clarity at the beginnings of the history of markedness, the terms marked and unmarked have been used as nothing more than descriptive labels for language phenomena which require further clarification. Defining markedness 59 2. Defining markedness A definition of markedness which can be assumed to provide a workable basis for linguistic analysis, and account for various sorts of language data which cannot be accounted for otherwise, should be based on an asymmetry which manifests itself either syntagmatically or paradigmatically. Syntagmatic markedness is encountered whenever both members of a single correlation can occur within the same context which is definable in terms of form ( e. g. sentence intonation and congruence phenomena) and of meaning, and by doing so one of them adds to it the information which is not added by the other member (which also does not add to it any incomparable sort of other information). This can be illustrated by the distinction between the present vs. the preterite verb forms (with the corresponding meaning correlation of past vs. nonpast) used in sentences with a past temporal adverbial, as mentioned in the preceding chapter.
eBook - PDF- Thomas A. Perry(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Syntactic Markedness and Frequency of Occurrence 51 Linda J. Schwartz 1.0 In Greenberg (1966) a number of criteria are cited which are taken to jointly characterize the notion of relative markedness in syntax and phonology. These are taken mainly from Jakobson (1939), Hjelmslev (1953), Trnka (1958) and Trubetzkoy (1939), and are summarized in (1) below. (1) 1. Universal implicational statements: given a statement of the form 'If a language has A, then it necessarily has B but not vice versa', this is to be interpreted as characterizing the implicans as marked and the implicatum as unmarked. 2. Zero expression: the unmarked term may show a zero inflec-tion in contrast to the marked term, e.g., prince (unmarked) vs. princess (marked). 3. Par excellence expression: the unmarked category may respresent either the generic category or the specific oppo-site member of the marked category, e.g., man 'human being/male human being' (unmarked) vs. woman 'female human being' (marked). 4. Facultative expression: the overt grammatical expression of a category is optional; the form without overt expression (i.e., the unmarked form) may be interpreted as having or lacking the category, e.g., English use of some terms like author and poet to represent writers of either gender, vs. authoress or poetess used only with reference to female writers. 5. Syncretization: distinctions existing in the unmarked member of a category are neutralized in the marked member, e.g., in English the masculine-feminine distinction in third person pronouns exists in the singular but is neutralized in the plural. 6. Contextual neutralization (Hjelmslev's 'participation'): the I am grateful to J. Ard, F. Householder, A. Raun and A. Valdman for their comments and suggestions on various points raised here, and to Gerald Sanders for his careful reading and criticism of a preliminary draft.
eBook - PDFCognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods
The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics
- Eugene H. Casad(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Unpacking markedness* Laura A. Janda 0. Introduction Markedness pervades vast sectors of the linguistic literature, unre-stricted by the theory or tradition of the authors who evoke it. In the course of its history (traced back 150 years in Andersen 1989), its meaning has become increasingly diffuse, and its application virtually limitless. For example, markedness has been used to describe the rela-tionships that hold among distinctive features, among phonemes, among allophones, among allomorphs, among semantic features, among the terms of case, number, person, tense and other morphologi-cal categories, among inflectional and derivational paradigms, among parts of speech, among syntactic constructions, among case systems, among vowel systems, and even among grammars. And markedness is said to manifest itself in a no less impressive array of phenomena, in-cluding neutralization, assimilation, reversal, syncretism, direction of language change, order and success of language acquisition, produc-tivity, and universal ordering of elements (i.e., a language that has a marked element must have the corresponding unmarked element, but the converse is not true). Clearly, markedness plays an essential role in language, at all levels of language, both synchronically and diachronically. Its importance is inescapable. But what is markedness? One thing that it seems not to be is a the-ory, and most scholars who have written on markedness from what-ever theoretical standpoint agree on this. In introducing the concept Battistella (1990: 5) states that markedness has so far resisted a satis-fying treatment, and no clearly defined theory of markedness has emerged. Lapointe (1983: 228-9) comes closer to a characterization of the problem, stating that markedness principles are ... analogous to physical laws, like the ideal gas laws of nineteenth century physics -they themselves are not assumed to be fundamental statements of the
eBook - PDFDialectology meets Typology
Dialect Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective
- Bernd Kortmann(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Markedness patterns have been attested in phonology, morphology and 48 Lieselotte Anderwald syntax. In what follows, I will be mainly concerned with morphological markedness. While originally markedness was conceived of as absolute (contrasting a marked item with its unmarked counterpart), it is clear today that markedness is a relative phenomenon. That is, item A is more or less marked with respect to a certain feature than item B. Prototypical examples come from inflections (Greenberg 1966; summarized in the very useful list in Croft 1990: 92–94). For example, in the category of number, the singular is unmarked, the plural is marked. Where there are three values, the relative nature of markedness relations becomes intuitively clearer. For example, in languages with a dual, the rare dual is more marked than the plural, and the plural is more marked than the singular. Especially when we are dealing with more than two values, it is useful to depict markedness relations with the help of hierarchies. These take the opposite order from markedness relations (although there is no accepted typographic convention to distinguish the two) 2 . The hierarchies equivalent to the markedness relations mentioned in this section therefore are (1) Hierarchies for number SINGULAR > PLURAL SINGULAR > PLURAL > DUAL Other examples come from the area of tenses (past tense is more marked than present) or polarity (negation is more marked than affirmation) 3 . Greenberg (1966) provides several criteria to determine which in a given pair (or triple, …) of terms is marked, and which is unmarked (cf. also the grouping in Croft 1990: 70–94). Text frequency is an important factor; it has even been suggested that frequency alone can account for all markedness effects and can therefore substitute the concept of ‘markedness’ altogether (see Haspelmath 2002: 237–252).
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