Markedness Linguistics Research Paper

1. Background In The Prague School

As Henning Andersen (1989) has noted, the idea of asymmetry in linguistics predated the actual coining of the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ in the 1930s, going back to work in the early 1800s. The modern concept of markedness originated in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and was proposed as a means of characterizing binary oppositions. In Prague School structuralism both sound and meaning were analyzed into systems of binary distinctive features representing sound and meaning as the presence or absence of relational properties or features. Binarism suggests symmetry and equivalence in linguistic analysis; markedness adds the idea of hierarchy. The fact that distinctions were characterized as the presence vs. the absence of some property implied an evaluation of any opposition into a mark and its absence. Thus for example, phonological oppositions such as nasal vs. nonnasal were defined as the presence vs. the absence of nasality; nasality was marked, nonnasality unmarked.

Oppositions manifest asymmetry in several ways, most notably for Trubetzkoy in terms of the diagnostic of neutralization, whereby the unmarked term of a phonological opposition was thought to be that which occurred in positions where the contrast was neutralized (i.e., here only one term of the opposition could occur.) In his 1932 article ‘Structure of the Russian Verb,’ Jakobson extended the concept of asymmetry to a view of grammatical meaning in which the marked element ‘announces the existence of [some meaning] A’ while the unmarked element ‘does not announce the existence of A, i.e., does not state whether A is present or not.’ This meant that an opposition like past vs. nonpast characterized three interpretations: past, present (as the opposite of past), and timelessness (the neutralization of the tense opposition). More generally, any semantic opposition involved three meanings: two unmarked and one marked. The breadth of the unmarked terms was extended by Jakobson to oppositions that were not inherently binary. In a 1972 article, 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’).’ Jakobson also suggested a role for markedness in language acquisition and loss, in his monograph Child Language, Aphasia, and Universals of Language (1941). Jakobson proposed a relationship between a universal feature hierarchy, the acquisition of sound distinctions by children and the loss of sound distinctions during aphasia. Today few linguists or aphasiologists adopt Jakobson’s positions literally, though many view them as useful tendencies (see Caramazza and Zurif 1978).

Semiotically oriented work in the Prague School tradition has viewed markedness as a means to investigate the isomorphism of form and meaning. Henning Andersen and Michael Shapiro have linked markedness to semiotic universals and to the work of Charles S. Peirce. The work of Cornelius van Schooneveld, Edna Andrews, Rodney Sangster, Yishai Tobin, and others foregrounds the notion of ‘semantic invariance’ (understood as the different general meanings reflected in the contextual specific meanings of features). The most well-known semantic invariants are those in Jakobson’s analysis of the Russian case and verb systems which attempt to ground semantics in spatial relations and in the relations among participants in the overall speech event (for recent work on invariance, see Waugh and Rudy 1991).

2. Markedness In Generative Grammar

Markedness entered generative linguistic theory through Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (1968). Following the Prague School view, phonological features were assumed to be part of a universal phonetic vocabulary. In addition, features were also incorporated into what was known as the ‘evaluation metric,’ a central concept in early versions of generative grammar. The evaluation metric was a means of selecting the most highly valued grammar capable of describing the facts of a language. 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. To deal with this, they introduced markedness as a means of encoding the intrinsic content of features. Chomsky and Halle proposed a set of 39 universal marking conventions tying naturalness to evaluation. In their system, an unmarked feature value was cost-free with respect to the evaluation metric, while the marked values were counted by the metric. Segment inventories could also be evaluated according to the number of marked features required to characterize them; sets of lexical items could be evaluated for markedness based on the number of marked features they entailed; and a concept of ‘linking’ reduced the number of features required to characterize processes corresponding to the markedness conventions. 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 system must have a certain minimal complexity and symmetry (see Kean 1980).

In syntax, markedness as feature-evaluation did not receive the same attention that it did in phonology. In Chomsky’s work, markedness evolved to a view of unmarked properties as an innate preference structure based first in constraints and later in parameters of universal grammar. Beginning in the 1970s, Chomsky attempted to greatly restrict the class of possible grammars, suggesting a relative rather than an absolute interpretation of conditions on rules. In such an approach, rules apply in accordance with the conditions unless specifically complicated to evade them, with Chomsky (1977) noting in his article ‘On Wh-movement’ that ‘The logic of this approach is essentially that of the theory of markedness.’ In their 1977 article ‘Filters and Control,’ Chomsky and Howard Lasnik extended to view markedness as part of a theory of ‘core grammar’:

We will assume that [Universal Grammar] in not an ‘undifferentiated’ system, but rather incorporates something analogous to a ‘theory of markedness’. Specifically, there is a theory of core grammar with highly restricted options, limited expressive power, and a few parameters. Systems that fall within core grammar constitute ‘the unmarked case’; we may think of them as optimal in terms of the evaluation metric. An actual language is determined by fixing the parameters of core grammar and then adding rules or conditions, using much richer resources, … These added properties of grammars we may think of as the syntactic analogue of irregular verbs. (1977, p. 430)

What is unmarked is the entire core grammar of a language, which is then supplemented by a marked periphery. In later versions of his theories, Chomsky has explored various positions on markedness, for example associating the unmarked with a child’s initial hypothesis. In a 1986 work, he summarized his views as follows:

The distinction between core and periphery leaves us with three notions of markedness: core versus periphery, internal to the core, and internal to the periphery. The second has to do with the way parameters are set in the absence of evidence. As for the third, there are, no doubt, significant regularities even in departures from the core principles (for example, in irregular verb morphology in English), and it may be that peripheral constructions are related to the core in systematic relaxing certain conditions of core grammar. (1986, p. 147)

Other researchers in generative syntax have tried to flesh out aspects of markedness, attempting to operationalize the idea of the cost of a marked syntactic construction or integrate markedness into the theory of parameters. Various approaches have been suggested, including tying markedness to an ordering of parameter values defined by subset relations among sentences, connecting it to types of triggering experiences or to default learning strategies, and using markedness to establish a universal syntactic feature hierarchy. Optimality Theory approaches emerging in the 1990s also incorporate markedness. In such approaches, in which constraints are ranked and candidate outputs may violate them to a greater or lesser degree, markedness is encoded in the constraints and ranking (see Archangeli 1997). 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.

3. Universals

Markedness has also been applied to typological and function and approaches to language, influenced by Joseph Greenberg’s 1966 book Language Universals. Greenberg surveyed the correlates and diagnostics of markedness proposed by Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and others in an attempt to find parallel diagnostic criteria across levels of language. Noting that unmarked grammatical categories in a language show characteristics correlated to the greater frequency of a category vis-a-vis its opposite, 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.’ In addition to emphasizing the role of frequency in determining markedness within a language, Greenberg applied frequency cross-linguistically, taking unmarked categories to be those that are unmarked in a wide number of languages. However, while frequency is an appealing diagnostic, it is also problematic because a phenomenon may be infrequent cross-linguistically but predominant in a particular language (a muchused example is preposition stranding in English, which appears to be marked cross-linguistically but unmarked in English).

Universals have also been proposed on the basis of implicational laws, with a category taken as generally marked if every language that has the unmarked category also has the marked one but not vice versa. Other approaches to universal markedness relations focus on functional economic and iconic motivations, tying recurring asymmetries 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 and in terms of iconism between the structure of language and conceptualization of the world. Similarly, Givon (1990) suggests that markedness related to cognitive complexity—‘in terms of attention, mental effort or processing time.’ And Mayerthaler, Dressler, and other ‘naturalists’ view markedness relations in terms of the ways in which extralinguistic principles of perceptibility and psychological efficiency determine what is natural in language. (Mayerthaler (1988), for example, defines unmarked as ‘in agreement with the typical attributes of the speaker.’)

4. Cultural Markedness

A main theme of markedness is the information content and information value of an element. Thus many researchers have seen markedness as an encoding of that which is unusual or informative. 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. In the 1930s Jakobson had already suggested applying markedness to any oppositions, explicitly mentioning such pairs as life/death, liberty/bondage, sin/virtue, and holiday/working day. Waugh (1982) extended this idea to note that oppositions like male/female, white/black, sighted/blind, hearing/deaf, heterosexual/homosexual, right/left, fertility/barrenness, clothed/nude, and spoken language/written language can all be treated as unmarked marked/cultural oppositions. And McCawley (1985) suggested that aspects of belief systems and even scientific theorizing could be analyzed as systems in which some assumptions are culturally unmarked. The papers in Myers-Scotton (1998) demonstrates ways in which intentionality is conveyed by adopting stylistically and culturally marked choices. Such approaches hold promise as a descriptive technique for domains beyond language, and recent work has applied markedness to music, myth and facial expression, among other things (see Hatten 1994, Liszka 1989).

As is evident, 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 are varies widely.

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