Markedness is one of the analytical principles of linguistics; it indicates the existence of asymmetric relationship inside the language category, and this concept is widely used in phonology, semantics, syntax analysis, sentence structures, pragmatics and applied linguistics. Therefore, the markedness is quite valuable to the analysis of languages. Prototype category theory is an important the...

This paper explores the role of morphological markedness constraints in an OT framework with interleaving of phonological and morphological constraints. Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against the realization of marked combinations of features. For example, a constraint like *[+GROUP +RESTRICTED] (*DUAL) would penalize any output with a single morpheme realizing features [+...

The study explores the difficulties of native English speakers in acquiring the Chinese word order, aiming to relate it to the markedness theories. According to the Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH), the degrees of learner difficulty in second language acquisition can be predicted according to the degrees of typological markedness between learners’ first language (L1) and their second la...

F0 characteristics were analyzed and modeled for the output of speech with natural prosody in communication systems. Lexicons were selected to express speaker's attitude during the human speech generation process. We modeled the prosody using information of constituent lexicons expressing attitude and markedness. Motivated by preliminary observations of prosodic variations in conversational spe...

This paper incorporates morphological markedness constraints into a framework in which morphology and phonology directly interact, modeled with interleaving of morphological and phonological constraints in serial OT (Wolf 2008, 2009). Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against realization (or spell-out) of morphologically marked feature sets. The empirical data motivating this...

Markedness is commonly regarded as one of the fundamental organizing principles of human language. However, the reasons for the existence of markedness phenomena continue to be controversial, if not to say obscure. The analysis of discourse corpora from three genetically unrelated languages which is conducted in this study suggests that at least one of the decisive aspects of markedness, namely...

Phonological grammars characterize distinctions between relatively well-formed (unmarked) and relatively ill-formed (marked) phonological structures. We review evidence that markedness influences speech error probabilities. Specifically, although errors result in both unmarked as well as marked structures, there is a markedness asymmetry: errors are more likely to produce unmarked outcomes. We ...