Orality and Markedness

Systemic Markedness and Faithfulness

1 Introduction Phonological patterns, whether viewed synchronically or as they change over time, can be explained only with reference to the larger system of oppositions that they are part of. This was the fundamental insight of modern phonology at the beginning of the last century, as it developed under the hands of de Saussure, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and others, in opposition to the atomistic ...

Coronal epenthesis and markedness

Logic & Markedness

The purpose of this essay is to establish the validity of the following four propositions. 1. The assumption that symbolic logic is valid a priori is false, as are the corollaries implicit in this assumption, namely, that symbolic logic is the one and only logic; that it is the logic of effective practical reasoning and action; and, that it is the logic that governs natural language. 2. Typolog...

Markedness and Agreement

This paper presents an account of the interpretation of unmarked verb forms in which the entries of unmarked forms are uniformly unspecified for agreement features. The entries of impersonal verbs directly sanction agreement-neutral syntagmatic structures. However, the entries of unmarked personal verbs sanction structures with negative agreement values, as a consequence of an inflectional bloc...

Descriptive and Explanatory Markedness

The wide empirical coverage of two number features, [±singular] and [±augmented], is used to show that (Greenbergian) category-internal markedness, (geometric) feature markedness, and value markedness are, respectively, epiphenomenal, untenable, and too simplistically formulated to be currently evaluated.