Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the second NP (nominative vs. accusative) were mani...

Our concern in this paper is with the interactions between language change, language acquisition, markedness, and computational complexity of mappings between grammatical representations. We demonstrate through a computational simulation of language change that markedness can produce ‘gaps’ in the distribution of combinations of linguistic features. Certain combinations will not occur, simply b...

Certain optional phonological processes may apply to any number of the potential targets in a form, yielding outputs in which the process applies to a proper subset of the available loci. Such patterns are incompatible with OT-based frameworks that produce variation by providing multiple constraint rankings. While one ranking may favour exhaustive application and another no application, no rank...

2 ABSTRACT The 'initial state' of a child's phonology has been much discussed but rarely empirically investigated within an Optimality Theory framework. The most common assumption has been that, at the onset of word production, all markedness constraints strictly dominate all faithfulness constraints. In this paper, the early phonologies of 20 children, five each learning one of four languages ...

Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-p...

Despite longstanding interest in defining what a tone system is and in contrasting tone, pitchand stress-accent systems, there have been surprisingly few attempts to sort out the relevant phonological properties which distinguish “true” tone systems from each other. In this paper, I explore a propertydriven typology of two-height tone systems, based on markedness. Drawing from a current databas...

This paper discusses a number of problems associated with the widely accepted analysis of differential object marking (DOM) as reflecting the semantic markedness of highly individuated (definite and/or animate) direct objects. Firstly, such an account is in conflict with established notions of transitivity which take a typical object to be highly affected, since affectedness can be shown to cor...

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness tool for capturing structural distribution inflectional affixes and predicting behavioral consequences that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue number specified features (which represents typ...