No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
... However, this might have been an artifact of how the Generalization phase in our experiment worked. In natural language, unmarked forms are the neutral default forms (Greenberg, 1966;Waugh, 1982;Zwicky, 1978). In our experiment, the Generalization phase included only two contexts, neither of which was neutral. ...
How much information do language users need to differentiate potentially absolute synonyms into near-synonyms? How consistent must the information be? We present two simple experiments designed to investigate this. After exposure to two novel verbs, participants generalized them to positive or negative contexts. In Experiment 1, there was a tendency across conditions for the verbs to become differentiated by context, even following inconsistent, random, or neutral information about context during exposure. While a subset of participants matched input probabilities, a high proportion did not. As a consequence, the overall pattern was of growth in differentiation that did not closely track input distributions. Rather, there were two main patterns: When each verb had been presented consistently in a positive or negative context, participants overwhelmingly specialized both verbs in their output. When this was not the case, the verbs tended to become partially differentiated, with one becoming specialized and the other remaining less specialized. Experiment 2 replicated and expanded on Experiment 1 with the addition of a pragmatic judgment task and neutral contexts at test. Its results were consistent with Experiment 1 in supporting the conclusion that quality of input may be more important than quantity in the differentiation of synonyms.
... When the male term is used as a generic term, the female term is also functionally marked, as it excludes male beings. For the different notions of markedness, see Zwicky (1978). with respect to SPEAKER ATTITUDE. ...
... The singular form dog is bare, thus not allowing the overt realization of a morpheme expressing singular. Zwicky (1978) defines the opposition between singular and plural as a matter of categorical binary distinction. In his treatment, plural, the marked category, bears a [+Plural] value, as opposed to the unmarked category, namely singular, whose value is [Plural]. ...
... linguists (Zwicky, 1978; Haspelmath, 2006). The notion of markedness that I am concerned with here is conceptual or semantic at its roots. ...
In this paper, I propose to extend a model of grammar in which lexical spellout and phonological computation occur in the same component (e.g., serial OT with Optimal Interleaving (Wolf, 2008)) with a family of morphological markedness constraints. These constraints punish realization of morpho-syntactically marked combinations of features. They form a markedness hierarchy in which constraints against more marked feature(s) are ranked higher than constraints against less marked feature(s). Inclusion of such constraints provides a natural way to account for certain cases of non-realization of morphological contrasts in marked contexts (zero marking), as well as cases of syncretism in which a marked paradigm cell in certain contexts becomes occupied by an exponent typically used in less marked cells. Analyses of both types of cases are discussed in this paper. Moreover, this model predicts tradeoffs and interactions between morphological markedness and phonological constraints. Russian Genitive Plural allomorphy, discussed in this paper, provides one example of such interactions.
... Obviously, the state of the art is not determined by the intrinsic possibilities offered by the concept of 'markedness'; on the contrary, the latter does indeed have far reaching implications for morphology. In fact, we have at our disposal not only a large body of typological generalisations from the Greenbergian tradition, but also theoretical elaborations on this type of evidence (see, e.g., Zwicky 1978). Rather, the fact that second language morphology has not been a testing ground for the MDH reflects the marginal role played by morphology in the development of SLA theory (which, on the other hand, is partly due to the fact that the most widely investigated second language, English, is rather poor in morphology). ...
... Obviously, the state of the art is not determined by the intrinsic possibilities offered by the concept of 'markedness'; on the contrary, the latter does indeed have far reaching implications for morphology. In fact, we have at our disposal not only a large body of typological generalisations from the Greenbergian tradition, but also theoretical elaborations on this type of evidence (see, e.g., Zwicky 1978). Rather, the fact that second language morphology has not been a testing ground for the MDH reflects the marginal role played by morphology in the development of SLA theory (which, on the other hand, is partly due to the fact that the most widely investigated second language, English, is rather poor in morphology). ...
... Obviously, the state of the art is not determined by the intrinsic possibilities offered by the concept of 'markedness'; on the contrary, the latter does indeed have far reaching implications for morphology. In fact, we have at our disposal not only a large body of typological generalisations from the Greenbergian tradition, but also theoretical elaborations on this type of evidence (see, e.g., Zwicky 1978). Rather, the fact that second language morphology has not been a testing ground for the MDH reflects the marginal role played by morphology in the development of SLA theory (which, on the other hand, is partly due to the fact that the most widely investigated second language, English, is rather poor in morphology). ...
... Obviously, the state of the art is not determined by the intrinsic possibilities offered by the concept of 'markedness'; on the contrary, the latter does indeed have far reaching implications for morphology. In fact, we have at our disposal not only a large body of typological generalisations from the Greenbergian tradition, but also theoretical elaborations on this type of evidence (see, e.g., Zwicky 1978). Rather, the fact that second language morphology has not been a testing ground for the MDH reflects the marginal role played by morphology in the development of SLA theory (which, on the other hand, is partly due to the fact that the most widely investigated second language, English, is rather poor in morphology). ...
The role of the mother tongue has been a major topic of second language acquisition research over the last few decades, but despite the overwhelming empirical evidence of cross-linguistic influence in learner language a number of questions still remain to be answered: what and how much is transferred when, how and why? This study explores the extent to which a theory of linguistic naturalness — the conceptual opposite of markedness, as formulated in Natural Phonology and Natural Morphology — might provide some insights into the issue of cross-linguistic influence. As an alternative to Eckman's (1977) 'Markedness Differential Hypothesis', a more detailed 'Naturalness Differential Hypothesis' is formulated in terms of phonological processes and morphological preferences. Unlike typological markedness, which may be regarded as a mere research tool, the notion of naturalness offers an explicit functional explanation of the observed learning difficulty, mainly in terms of ease of production and perception. Empirical support for these claims will be drawn from research on the spontaneous acquisition of Italian as a second language.
Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mundari tribes from the Jharkhand region of the Indian subcontinent, exhibits an omnivorous pattern for person, number, and gender marking. This pattern can be seen with ditransitives where both the indirect and direct object compete for a single object-marking slot in the verbal complex. The choice between them is determined by an interplay of prominence scales for person (1 > 2 > 3) and number (sg > pl > du), acting alongside a animacy-based gender system. We provide an analysis of scale-driven Agree in Mundari that makes use of both bivalent features for person and number in addition to cyclic Agree. Furthermore, we argue that syntactic probes must be able to probe for contextually unmarked values. This is motivated by the theoretical challenge posed by the number scale in Mundari, which seems to express a preference for unmarked number values over marked ones. Finally, we consider which other omnivorous patterns for person and number exist cross-linguistically and explore the predictions that our analysis makes for other languages.
In the evolution of morphological studies, morphological features and markedness have come to play increasingly important rôles. Feature notation in morphology allows the development of the notion of natural morphological class, renders explicit much of the internal structure of paradigms and permits the exploitation, suitably adapted, of many of the results obtained in phonology. Markedness considerations, particularly when linked to general theories of morphology, again highlight morphological structure, constrain the variety of permitted analyses, and indicate, at least in part, the expected direction of historical change. In the sections to follow, I will present an analysis of Old French nominal and adjectival inflection which makes key use of morphological features and the differences between the marked and unmarked values of these features. This study will be particularly concerned with constraining the morphological analysis of Old French and conversely, with using Old French data to investigate more general properties of morphological systems.
A speaker may conceptualise a situation from three different modal ‘perspectives’: epistemic, evidential, and attitudinal. Languages differ in which of these concepts they perspectivise and how a grammaticalised concept may be extended to the other two. ‘Lesser-known’ languages tend to be misrepresented in the typological literature. E.g., the Modern Tibetic languages, including the Ladakhi dialects, are said to have grammaticalised the concept of evidentiality . However, their ‘evidential’ systems differ from the cross-linguistically acknowledged evidential systems, in that speaker attitude is co-grammaticalised and knowledge based on perception shares properties with knowledge based on inferences. DeLancey therefore claimed that these systems also encode mirativity. The starting point for the development of these typologically rather uncommon ‘evidential’ systems was a lexical marker for non-commitment (or admirativity): the auxiliary ḥdug.
Corpus data evidence shows that antonymous pairs tend to be used in a preferred sequence in a sentence. Jones (2002) proposed seven factors as sequence rules in his study of English antonyms (morphology, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology and idiomaticity), presenting as only marginal the factors of word frequency and markedness. This research differs from Jones' study with respect to methodology, the size of the database and the treatment of the concept of markedness, which results in a much higher proportion of statistically relevant pairs, and different conclusions regarding the factors of antonym ordering. It argues that there is a strong correlation between antonym sequence in language use and the concept of markedness. It is argued that the distributional asymmetries of antonym ordering in language use are conceptual in nature and influenced by the principle of markedness and the principles of temporal and visual-spatial ordering.
This article investigates complex agreement patterns with the polite plural pronoun vi and so-called ‘hybrid nouns’ in Serbian. I show how many curious agreement phenomena are to a great extent determined by the inability of an agreement target to simultaneously agree with an exclusively semantic and an exclusively formal φ-feature of an agreement controller. Consequently, in some cases (e.g., the polite plural pronoun vi) masculine emerges as the default gender value, as a result of an independently motivated mechanism. I argue that an analysis based on these two factors allows for wider empirical coverage than the analysis developed in Wechsler and Hahm (2011) and Wechsler (2011) based on an Agreement Marking Principle. I also discuss the so-called ‘different pronoun hypothesis’, which Wechsler and Hahm (2011) propose to explain different types of agreement triggered by the polite plural pronoun. In light of some new facts, however, I argue that the ‘different adjective hypothesis’ in fact might be on the right track. Along the way, I also develop an analysis of gender agreement with coordinated phrases consisting of singular number conjuncts and suggest that gender in Serbian should be represented in terms of binary features [±masculine] and [±feminine].
In the studies of opposite pairings, the saying that some opposite pairs have one member as unmarked and the other marked “covers a number of disparate and independent phenomena” (Lyons 1977: 305). A lot of work has been done on selecting criteria for determining the unmarked/marked members (e.g., Lehrer 1985). This paper reviews the three most used criteria (morphological mark, semantic meaning and context-frequency) in previous studies and examines the theoretical criteria with natural language facts, especially with examples of Chinese. The aim is to discuss whether such criteria are capable in practical using.
Change is an inherent feature of all aspects of language, and syntax is no exception. While the synchronic study of syntax allows us to make discoveries about the nature of syntactic structure, the study of historical syntax offers even greater possibilities. Over recent decades, the study of historical syntax has proven to be a powerful scientific tool of enquiry with which to challenge and reassess hypotheses and ideas about the nature of syntactic structure which go beyond the observed limits of the study of the synchronic syntax of individual languages or language families. In this timely Handbook, the editors bring together the best of recent international scholarship on historical syntax. Each chapter is focused on a theme rather than an individual language, allowing readers to discover how systematic descriptions of historical data can profitably inform and challenge highly diverse sets of theoretical assumptions.
Historically, the term neutralization originated from the field of phonology, yet it has become widely used in the field of meaningful units as well. The goal of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it traces back the origins of the different ways the term has been used in the field of meaningful units, viz. lexicon, grammar, and discourse, in 20th-century linguistics. On the other hand, it determines to what extent it is theoretically reasonable to use the term for the variety of phenomena which have come under its extension. In the introductory section, the focus is on the notion of neutralization as developed by the Prague School of Linguistics, particularly in the writings of Trubetzkoy. In the second part of the paper, the use of the term neutralization outside the domain of phonology is examined in a chronological way: first, Hjelmslev's view on neutralization is discussed (section 2.1.); then, an overview is given of the use of the term in the 1950s (sections 2.2. and 2.3.); the third section deals with the notion of neutralization from the 1960s onwards. In this final part, nine different senses of neutralization (with various sub-senses) are distinguished. In order to prevent neutralization from becoming a vacuous or superfluous term in linguistics, I argue that its use should be confined to a particular type of linguistic phenomenon and that some of the concepts it has denoted in 20th-century linguistics should be better expressed by other (either already existing or new) terminologies.
This book was first published in 2007. How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture.
It is well known that British and American English differ substantially in their pronunciation and vocabulary - but differences in their grammar have largely been underestimated. This volume focuses on British-American differences in the structure of words and sentences and supports them with computer-aided studies of large text collections. Present-day as well as earlier forms of the two varieties are included in the analyses. This makes it the first book-length treatment of British and American English grammar in contrast, with topics ranging from compound verbs to word order differences and tag questions. The authors explore some of the better-known contrasts, as well as a great variety of innovative themes that have so far received little or no consideration. Bringing together the work of a team of leading scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to those working within the fields of English historical linguistics, language variation and change, and dialectology.
This paper discusses Proto-Indo-European accent paradigms, that is, the interaction among accent, ablaut and suffixes in the Proto-Indo-European inflectional system, which represents one of the most controversial topics in current Indo-European studies. Traditionally, Proto-Indo-European accent paradigms are given a phonological explanation, concerning sound change and syncope. After having considered the problems relating to this traditional explanation, we will suggest an alternative hypothesis for Proto-Indo-European accent paradigms, which takes into consideration not only their form, but also their function. In this, we will show firstly that accent paradigms are better explained morphologically, and secondly that semantic.
Oceanic languages have rich systems of number marking, most including formal exponence of a dual, and very many also marking trial and/or paucal. In most Vanuatu languages number marking combines with person marking, including clusivity, in both independent pronoun paradigms and subject referencing paradigms. This study of pairs of these two kinds of paradigms in 34 Vanuatu languages shows that, in contrast to person values which can have fewer contrasting forms only in a subject referencing paradigm, contrasts in number values may be fewer either in the independent pronoun paradigm or in the corresponding subject referencing paradigm.
Em kadiwéu, uma língua Guaikurú, a pessoa do objeto afeta concordância e ordem de
constituintes. O verbo deve ser marcado por um morfema relacional se o argumento
interno for de primeira ou segunda pessoa, e um morfema de concordância de pessoa
ocorre seguindo a hierarquia 1plOBJ>2>1>3 . Além disso, um argumento de primeira ou
segunda pessoa deve preceder o verbo (ordem OV, o relacional ocorre), mas um
argumento de terceira pessoa segue o verbo (ordem VO, o relacional não ocorre). Este
trabalho argumenta que o morfema chamado de relacional é um morfema de concordância.
Nesta abordagem, trata-se de um morfema empobrecido que marca concordância com um
argumento inerno deslocado. Mais especificamente, este trabalho argumenta que os
morfemas de pessoa do kadiwéu são concordância de TP, mas o chamado relacional é
concordância de vP revertida para [-autor, -participante]. Este trabalho desenvolve
ideias de Rodrigues (1990) sobre neutralização
de pessoa.
This article investigates which principles govern the order of antonyms in language use and why antonyms tend to be used in a particular sequence in the sentence. The traditional notion about the paradigmatic relations is that the words in a paradigmatic relation must be replaceable, one for the other, in all contexts. Although antonymy is a paradigmatic relation and antonyms are similar in many respects, members of an antonymous pair may not show symmetrical distribution in actual language use. This study is motivated by an observation, based on corpus data, that certain antonymous pairs tend to be used in a preferred sequence in the sentence. Of the fifty-six English antonymous pairs investigated by Jones (2002), only fourteen did not show any marked preference towards either of the two possible orderings in the sentence. This research was conducted in the electronic corpus of contemporary Serbian language and differs from the study of antonym sequence in English done by Jones with respect to certain aspects of methodology, size of the database and the treatment of the concept of markedness. The results show that three-quarters of the fifty-seven antonymous pairs pre-selected for this study are used in a preferred sequence in text and that there is a strong correlation between antonym sequence in language use and the concept of markedness. It is argued that antonym sequence in written discourse is influenced by the following principles: word frequency, neutrality, temporal and visual-spatial ordering and gender. The conclusion is that the distributional patterns of antonym sequence reflect general cognitive principles and conceptual representations.
The role of the mother tongue has been a major topic of second language acquisition research over the last few decades, but despite the overwhelming empirical evidence of cross-linguistic influence in learner language a number Of questions still remain to be answered: what and how much is transferred when, how and why? This study explores the extent to which a theory of linguistic naturalness — the conceptual opposite of markedness, as formulated in Natural Phonology and Natural Morphology — might provide some insights into the issue of cross-linguistic influence. As an alternative to Eckman's (1977) 'Markedness Differential Hypothesis', a more detailed 'Naturalness Differential Hypothesis' is formulated in terms of phonological processes and morphological preferences. Unlike typological markedness, which may be regarded as a mere research tool, the notion of naturalness offers an explicit functional explanation of the observed learning difficulty, mainly in terms of ease of production and perception. Empirical support for these Claims will be drawn from research on the spontaneous acquisition of Italian äs a second language.
This paper argues that split ergativity based on nominal type is a morphological phenomenon, not a syntactic one. We use three tests to identify the source of this type of split ergativity as morphological syncretism: (i) case agreement, (ii) syntactic ergativity, (iii) coordination. We illustrate the complex patterns of attested splits, demonstrating that analyses positing a single dichotomy (e.g. between first and second person pronouns versus all other nominals) are insufficient. A morphological syncretism analysis is provided whereby ergative case is deleted in featurally-marked contexts.
Any theory of person features must account for known typological patterns (including the inventory of persons and generalizations about syncretism), but also provide a handle on the person morphology of individual languages. In this paper, we develop an analysis of person based on the following core assumptions. (i) Person features represent functions that operate on an initial set of possible discourse referents, or on the output of other person functions. Which combinations of person features are well-formed follows from the properties of the functions they represent (compare Harbour 2011b, 2011c). (ii) There are two such person features. Their semantic specification implies that one is shared by first and second person, while the other is shared by second and third person (see Kerstens 1993; Halle 1997; Bennis and MacLean 2006; Aalberse and Don 2011). (iii) Rules that operate on features (including rules of impoverishment and spell-out rules) are sensitive to the order in which the functions represented by person features apply. The main results of the proposed theory are (a) an explanation of the typological inventory of persons (first, second and third in the singular; first inclusive, first exclusive, second and third in the plural); (b) an explanation of the typological observation that syncretism between first and third person is much rarer than syncretism between either first and second, or second and third person (see Baerman et al. 2005; Baerman and Brown 2011); (c) a descriptively adequate analysis of person agreement in Dutch where two person endings arrange themselves in such a way that there is a 2-3 syncretism in the regular case, a 1-2 syncretism under subject-verb inversion, and an optional 1-3 syncretism with a particular lexical class of verbs (modals).
This article discusses morphological markedness as a trigger and target of postsyntactic feature-deletion operations (impoverishment; Bobaljik 2003, Bonet 1991, Halle 1997, Halle and Marantz 1993, Harley 2008, Noyer 1992, 1998) and, taking number as a case study, argues that dual is more marked than plural, in accordance with traditional and more recent approaches to inflectional morphology. In a system that employs binary features, dual may be represented by a combination of the features [−singular, −augmented] (Conklin 1962, Noyer 1992), and the feature [−augmented] is marked in the context of [−singular]. This article draws a formal distinction between markedness-targeted impoverishment and markedness-triggered impoverishment, arguing that the latter is an important diagnostic for morphological markedness. Exemplification comes from syncretisms either directed at or conditioned by the dual in Sámi, Sorbian, Slovenian, Warlpiri, and Zuni, the last of which has been argued by Cowper (2005) to show that dual is less marked than plural.
We present a corpus-based study of methods that have been proposed in the linguistics literature for selecting the semantically unmarked term out of a pair of antonymous adjectives. Solutions to this problem are applicable to the more general task of selecting the positive term from the pair. Using automatically collected data, the accuracy and applicability of each method is quantified, and a statistical analysis of the significance of the results is performed. We show that some simple methods are indeed good indicators for the answer to the problem while other proposed methods fail to perform better than would be attributable to chance. In addition, one of the simplest methods, text frequency, dominates all others. We also apply two generic statistical learning methods for combining the indications of the individual methods, and compare their performance to the simple methods. The most sophisticated complex learning method offers a small, but statistically significant, improvement over the original tests.
This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one low-frequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data come from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The
Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are, however, clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable, and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.
Standard treatments of antonymy regularly state that of a pair of antonyms, one member is marked while the other one is unmarked. Certain semantic and syntactic properties are predicated of the unmarked (or in some cases of the marked) member of the pair. A few examples are given, usually 20 or so, which bear out the predictions.(Received February 20 1985)
The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective vysokij ‘high’, a morphologically unrelated term nizkij ‘low’ and a morphologically related adjective nevysokij ‘not.high’. I argue that the two terms co-exist because they provide different ways of looking at the lower subscale of vertical size. The distribution exhibited by the adjectives under study is symptomatic of the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension identified by MacLaury in the domain of colour. Two sets of data – a corpus and an elicitation test – provide converging evidence that nizkij ‘low’ names the dominant vantage on the lower subscale: it is more frequent and evenly distributed over referent categories. Nevysokij ‘not.high’ is a recessive term: it is characterised by lower frequency, a rather narrow range of application, and a distribution skewed towards human referents. The findings from this study are compared to the results of earlier research on colour terminology, which raises several methodological questions concerning the application of Vantage Theory to lexical domains other than colour.
This paper argues that three widely accepted motivating factors subsumed under the broad heading of iconicity, namely iconicity of quantity, iconicity of complexity and iconicity of cohesion in fact have no role in explaining grammatical asymmetries and should be discarded. The iconicity accounts of the relevant phenomena have been proposed by authorities like Jakobson, Haiman and Giv贸n, but I argue that these linguists did not sufficiently consider alternative usage-based explanations in terms of frequency of use. A closer look shows that the well-known Zipfian effects of frequency of use (leading to shortness and fusion) can be made responsible for all of the alleged iconicity effects, and initial corpus data for a range of phenomena confirm the correctness of the approach.
This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms and have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of .
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.