In this paper I propose a general approach to the study of constraints on cooccurrence of grammatical categories and present one case study of a functionally infelicitous combination from the domain of TAM categories, the present perfective. It is argued that constraints on co-occurrence of particular categories can be accounted for in terms of local markedness and markedness hierarchies. This ...

Discourse relations can be categorized as continuous or discontinuous in the hypothesis of continuity (Murray, 1997), with continuous relations expressing normal succession of events in discourse such as temporal, spatial or causal. Asr and Demberg (2013) propose a markedness measure to test the prediction that discontinuous relations may have more unambiguous connectives, but restrict the mark...

The acquisition of French object pronominal clitics was investigated from a crosslinguistic transfer and markedness perspective of parameterization. Native speakers of English (-clitics) and Spanish (+clitics) were provided with brief training in French lexical items and the cliticization of object pronouns followed by a grammaticality judgment task including both cliticized and non-pronominal ...

Lexicalised concepts are represented in wordnets by word-sense pairs. The strength of markedness is one of the factors which influence word use. Stylistically unmarked words are largely contextneutral. Technical terms, obsolete words, “officialese”, slangs, obscenities and so on are all marked, often strongly, and that limits their use considerably. We discuss the position of register and marke...

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...

This paper argues for a model of morphology and phonology in which phonological form is represented purely in terms of markedness rather than by strings of segments. The argument runs as follows: (i) underlying representations are prosodified; (ii) this makes them relatively ill-formed; (iii) so representations can be represented purely in terms of ill-formedness. Step (i) brings to its logical...