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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Markedness | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:13:13.402808+00:00 | kb-cron |
== 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 consonants is typically unmarked. But between vowels 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'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 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, 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':