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 structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy as a means of characterizing binary oppositions.Andersen, Henning (1989). "Markedness—The First 150 Years". In Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony.
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Since a main component of markedness is the information content and information value of an element,Battistella, Markedness, 1990. 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 as chance-correct unidirectional components of the Matthews Correlation Coefficient corresponding to 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.
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Other work has applied markedness to stylistics, music, and myth.Myers-Scotton, Carol (ed.) Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties. Oxford, 1998Hatten, Robert Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Indiana University Press, 1994Liszka, James J. The Semiotic of Myth.
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More recently, optimality theory approaches emerging in the 1990s have incorporated markedness in the ranking of constraints.Archangeli 1997.
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Davison, Alice. 1984. Syntactic markedness and the definition of sentence topic. Language, vol. 60 no. 4, pp. 797–846.
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The Theory of Markedness in Generative Grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club. 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.
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Based on markedness theory, the Prague Linguistic Circle made great advances in the study of phonetics reforming it as the systemic study of phonology. Although the terms opposition and markedness are rightly associated with Saussure's concept of language as a semiological system, he did not invent the terms and concepts which had been discussed by various 19th century grammarians before him.
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Today many still see Jakobson's theory of phonological acquisition as identifying useful tendencies.Battistella, Edwin (1996). The Logic of Markedness. New York: Oxford University Press.
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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.
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However, Informedness and Markedness are Kappa- like renormalizations of Recall and Precision, and their geometric mean Matthews correlation coefficient thus acts like a debiased F-measure.
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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.Waugh, Linda "Marked and Unmarked: A Choice Between Unequals in Semiotic Structure". Semiotica; 38: 299–318, 1982 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.Battistella, Edwin Markedness, 1990, pp. 188–189.
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In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as unusual or divergent in comparison to a more common or regular form. 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.
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Edwin Battistella (born 1955) is an American linguist known for work on markedness, syntax, and language attitudes. He is a professor of Humanities and Culture at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.
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In social sciences 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, 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.
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The Markedness model, developed by Carol Myers-Scotton, is one of the more complete theories of code-switching motivations. It posits that language users are rational and choose to speak a language that clearly marks their rights and obligations, relative to other speakers, in the conversation and its setting. When there is no clear, unmarked language choice, speakers practice code-switching to explore possible language choices. Many sociolinguists, however, object to the Markedness Model's postulation that language-choice is entirely rational.
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The markedness model (sociolinguistic theory) proposed by Carol Myers-Scotton is one account of the social indexical motivation for code-switching.Auer, Peter. (1998) Code-switching in conversation: language, interaction and identity, ed. Peter Auer.
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Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 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."Battistella, Edwin (1990).
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Although not as typical of sound change as lenition, fortition may occur in prominent positions, such as at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable; as an effect of reducing markedness; or due to morphological leveling.
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Battistella, Edwin The Logic of Markedness, 1996, p. 51. 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.
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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.
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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.Eckman, F. R. (1991). "The Structural Conformity Hypothesis and the Acquisition of Consonantal Clusters in the Interlanguage of Learners". Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13(1), 23–41.
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Analyst Peter Auer has critiqued the markedness model for not adequately describing speakers’ perceptions of their own behavior. He contends that in switching codes speakers do not make reference to any pre-existing normative model but rather actively create and produce social meaning according to the particularities of the interaction. Blommaert and Meeuwis, drawing on a study of Zairians in Belgium, have further proposed that the markedness model is limited in its failure to account for variability within languages (codes), describing only shifts from one language to another. They criticize the model for assuming monolingualism to be the normative point of reference in communication.
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Reprinted in Russian and Slavic Grammar Studies, 1931–1981. Mouton, 1984. 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')."Jakobson, R. (1972).
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His research has also analyzed various definitions of markedness as they may apply to word order.Google Scholar citations of Dr. Dryer's publications He has done original research on Kutenai and is currently doing research (in conjunction with Lea Brown) on a number of languages of Papua New Guinea, among them Walman.
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If the latter, how is this constraint formally related to the OCP; (iii) status as an OT constraint - is the OCP a single constraint, or is it the local self- conjunction of markedness constraints (Alderete 1997)? These and other issues related to the OCP continue to be hotly debated in phonological theory.
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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".
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"Verbal Communication". Scientific American 227: 72–80. In his 1941 Child Language, Aphasia, and Universals of Language, Jakobson suggested that phonological markedness played a role in language acquisition and loss. Drawing on existing studies of acquisition and aphasia, Jakobson suggested a mirror-image relationship determined by a universal feature hierarchy of marked and unmarked oppositions.
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Marked choices are often accompanied by prosodic features such as pauses, or metacommentary on the switch. When the unmarked choice is not clear, speakers use code-switching in an exploratory way to establish the favored social balance. Myers-Scotton has proposed that the markedness model is applicable to all language choices, beyond the limits of code-switching.Myers-Scotton, Carol.
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Givón, T. Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction, vol. 2, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990. 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".
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David Powers has pointed out that F1 ignores the True Negatives and thus is misleading for unbalanced classes, while kappa and correlation measures are symmetric and assess both directions of predictability - the classifier predicting the true class and the true class predicting the classifier prediction, proposing separate multiclass measures Informedness and Markedness for the two directions, noting that their geometric mean is correlation.
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In some languages the gender is distinguished only in singular number but not in plural. In terms of linguistic markedness, these languages neutralize the gender opposition in the plural, itself a marked category. So adjectives and pronouns have three forms in singular (e.g. Bulgarian червен, червена, червено or German roter, rote, rotes) but only one in plural (Bulgarian червени, German rote) [all examples mean "red"].
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Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language. State University of New York Press. 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.
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The results showed that three-year-old children were able to recognize the markedness, by responding to the gesture and cleaning the objects up as opposed to when the gesture was presented without being marked. In the second study in which the same experiment was performed on two-year-olds, the results were different. For the most part, the children did not recognize the difference between the marked and unmarked gesture by not responding more prevalently to the marked gesture, unlike the results of the three-year-olds. This shows that this sort of nonverbal communication is learned at a young age, and is better recognized in three-year-old children than two-year-old children, making it easier for us to interpret that the ability to recognize markedness is learned in the early stages of development, somewhere between three and four years of age.
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Result-based oppositions in the lexicon This approach suggests the idea of viewing resultativeness as a system of oppositions. It hypothesizes that the resultative is not restricted to a tense or an aspect form. It suggests that the resultativeness is expressed by oppositions of marked/unmarked forms throughout all language levels and subsystems. Markedness is a system that contrasts two language forms as distinguished based on simplicity and frequency of usage.
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Myers-Scotton gives the following example to illustrate the markedness model, involving a clerk and customer at a bank in Nairobi for whom the unmarked code choice is Swahili. The customer begins speaking in the unmarked Swahili and later switches to Luo, their shared ethnic language, to index social solidarity with the clerk, trying to solicit extra help.Myers-Scotton, Carol. (1993) “Common and Uncommon Ground: Social and Structural Factors in Codeswitching”.
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A circle of radius is drawn. Then, the markedness of the ruler comes into play: one mark of the ruler is placed at and the other at . While keeping the ruler (but not the mark) touching , the ruler is slid and rotated until one mark is on the circle and the other is on the line . The mark on the circle is labeled and the mark on the line is labeled .
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In linguistics, markedness can apply to, among others, phonological, grammatical, and semantic 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.
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As may be seen by the markedness of her change after her few weeks stay at Thrushcross Grange. During Cathy's fatal illness, Nelly notes that Catherine is very frail, and has "a bloodless lip", an image which serves to augment the Gothic undertones of her final days; nevertheless, Nelly describes her in death as divine: "no angel in heaven looked as beautiful as her", and her countenance resembled "perfect peace".
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Markedness (deltap) is Youden's J used to assess the reverse or abductive direction, and matches well human learning of associations; rules and, superstitions as we model possible causation; while correlation and kappa evaluate bidirectionally. Matthews correlation coefficient is the geometric mean of the regression coefficient of the problem and its dual, where the component regression coefficients of the Matthews correlation coefficient are Markedness (inverse of Youden's J or deltap) and informedness (Youden's J or deltap'). Kappa statistics such as Fleiss' kappa and Cohen's kappa are methods for calculating inter-rater reliability based on different assumptions about the marginal or prior distributions, and are increasingly used as chance corrected alternatives to accuracy in other contexts. Fleiss' kappa, like F-score, assumes that both variables are drawn from the same distribution and thus have the same expected prevalence, while Cohen's kappa assumes that the variables are drawn from distinct distributions and referenced to a model of expectation that assumes prevalences are independent.
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For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word amo ("I love") is marked by suffix -o for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Analytic languages tend to have a relatively limited number of markers. Markers should be distinguished from the linguistic concept of markedness. An unmarked form is the basic "neutral" form of a word, typically used as its dictionary lemma, such as—in English—for nouns the singular (e.g.
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These established the structuralist framework to literary criticism. In Europe, the most important work after Saussure's death was done by the Prague school. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades from 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses.
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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.Kean, Mary-Louise (1980).
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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.
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Note, however, that the F-scores do not take the true negative rate into account, and are more suited to information retrieval and information extraction evaluation where the true negatives are innumerable. Instead, measures such as the phi coefficient, Matthews correlation coefficient, informedness or Cohen's kappa may be preferable to assess the performance of a binary classifier. As a correlation coefficient, the Matthews correlation coefficient is the geometric mean of the regression coefficients of the problem and its dual. The component regression coefficients of the Matthews correlation coefficient are markedness (deltap) and informedness (Youden's J statistic or deltap').
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Instead, either values for one measure are compared for a fixed level at the other measure (e.g. precision at a recall level of 0.75) or both are combined into a single measure. Examples of measures that are a combination of precision and recall are the F-measure (the weighted harmonic mean of precision and recall), or the Matthews correlation coefficient, which is a geometric mean of the chance- corrected variants: the regression coefficients Informedness (DeltaP') and Markedness (DeltaP). Accuracy is a weighted arithmetic mean of Precision and Inverse Precision (weighted by Bias) as well as a weighted arithmetic mean of Recall and Inverse Recall (weighted by Prevalence).
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The opacity of such phenomena finds no straightforward explanation in Optimality Theory, since theoretical intermediate forms are not accessible (constraints refer only to the surface form and/or the underlying form). There have been a number of proposals designed to account for it, but most of the proposals significantly alter Optimality Theory's basic architecture and therefore tend to be highly controversial. Frequently, such alterations add new types of constraints (which are not universal faithfulness or markedness constraints), or change the properties of (such as allowing for serial derivations) or . Examples of these include John J. McCarthy's sympathy theory and candidate chains theory, among many others.
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Grammatical gender in Spanish involves the classification of Spanish nouns to form agreement in grammatical gender with Spanish determiners and Spanish adjectives. All Spanish nouns have a lexical gender of either masculine or feminine, and most nouns referring to male humans are grammatically masculine, while most referring to females are feminine.Gender of nouns in Spanish - Gender rules In terms of markedness, the masculine is unmarked and the feminine is marked in Spanish. Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish kinship terminology derives more female terms from male terms: for example, uncle/aunt is '/' in Spanish but '/' in French; brother/sister is '/' in Spanish but '/' in Italian.
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According to Myers-Scotton, for any communicative situation there exists an unmarked, expected RO Set and a marked, differential one. In choosing a code the speaker evaluates the markedness of their potential choices, determined by the social forces at work in their community, and decides either to follow or reject the normative model. Making the marked choice is thus a conscious bid for a new RO Set. Speakers employ code choices rationally, as a way of establishing their social position according to the Negotiation Principle: “Choose the form of your conversational contribution such that it indexes the set of rights and obligations which you wish to be in force between the speaker and addressee for the current exchange”.
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Levelling analogical change can occur in sound change when some forms in a given paradigm provide a correct environment for a change, and with forms which do not provide the correct environment for the sound change being modified to exemplify the same changes. This kind of change may be exemplified from vowel changes in Old English, where forms such as whale (from OE hwæl) take a long vowel rather than the short vowel expected by regular sound change due to the vowel being lengthened in other forms in the same paradigm (in this case, the plural whales, cf. staff/staves).Dresher, B. Elan. (2000). 'Analogical leveling of vowel length in West Germanic', in Lahiri, Aditi (ed.), Analogy, Levelling, Markedness : Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology.
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Sign-oriented analyses present an aspectual contrast, in which the approach is based on the boundaries of predication within a time-field. An action is perceived as a whole within a predication or it could be perceived as the predication within the boundaries. A markedness relationship is one between the perfective and imperfective. This analysis argues against the view that the resultative meaning is identical to the perfect. Below are sentences where the verbs in the perfect do not have the ‘element of result’ in their meaning: I’ve seen it before. It’s only been three or four times that we’ve come face to face. In the sentences above ‘the element of result’ does not seem apparent. It is argued that the concrete result and the result phase should be distinguished from each other.
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In 1949, French existentialist Simone De Beauvoir described in her book The Second Sex two concepts that would later be developed in the fields of linguistics and psychology and become the basis for the male-as-norm principle in second-wave feminism. Beauvoir writes that man is regarded as "both the positive and the neutral," foreshadowing the study of markedness, or the linguistic distinction between the "marked" and "unmarked" terms of an opposition. Specifically, "the notion that the typical contrast between opposites… is not symmetric." Rather, the contrast between oppositions is often asymmetric meaning "the positive, or unmarked, term can be neutralized in meaning to denote the scale as a whole rather than just the positive end; but the negative, or marked, term can denote just the negative end".
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Each element within each system is eventually contrasted with all other elements in different types of relations so that not two elements have the exact same value: :"Within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter 'dread', craindre 'fear,' and avoir peur 'be afraid' have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors." Saussure defined his own theory in terms of binary oppositions: sign—signified, meaning—value, language—speech, synchronic—diachronic, internal linguistics—external linguistics, and so on. The related term markedness denotes the assessment of value between binary oppositions. These were studied extensively by post-war structuralists such as Claude Lévi- Strauss to explain the organisation of social conceptualisation, and later by the post-structuralists to criticise it.
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Another problem with TOC AUC is that reducing the TOC Curve to a single number ignores the fact that it is about the tradeoffs between the different systems or performance points plotted and not the performance of an individual system, as well as ignoring the possibility of concavity repair, so that related alternative measures such as Informedness or DeltaP are recommended. These measures are essentially equivalent to the Gini for a single prediction point with DeltaP' = informedness = 2AUC-1, whilst DeltaP = markedness represents the dual (viz. predicting the prediction from the real class) and their geometric mean is the Matthews correlation coefficient. Whereas TOC AUC varies between 0 and 1 — with an uninformative classifier yielding 0.5 — the alternative measures known as informedness, Certainty and Gini coefficient (in the single parameterization or single system case) all have the advantage that 0 represents chance performance whilst 1 represents perfect performance, and −1 represents the "perverse" case of full informedness always giving the wrong response.
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Epinephelus marginatus is a very large, oval-bodied and large-headed fish with a wide mouth which has a protruding lower jaw. The head and upper body are coloured dark reddish brown or greyish, usually with yellowish gold countershading on the ventral surfaces; the base colour is marked by a vertical series of irregular pale greenish yellow or silvery grey or whitish blotching which is normally rather conspicuous on the body and head; the black maxillary streak varies in its markedness; dark brown median fins; distal edges of the anal and caudal fins and also often pectoral fins have narrow white terminal bands; the pelvic fins are black towards their tips while the pectoral fins are dark reddish-brown or grey; the margin of spiny dorsal fin and basal part of the pectoral fins are often golden yellow in colour. There are eleven spines and 13-16 soft rays in the dorsal fin. This species can grow up to 150 cm in standard length but is more often 90 cm.
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