Talk:Markedness

more examples?
Does this only apply to examples when the masculine term is used as a neutral term for both female and male things, or is there a broader scope to it? Zigzig20s 22:12, 8 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It has a very broad scope, though the edges are poorly defined. I think another fairly uncontroversial example would be the word go, which isn't strongly marked for tense — it's often used in the present ("I go there daily"), but can also be used in the past ("I had to go yesterday"; "I asked him to go yesterday"; "I used to go"; and so on) — whereas the word went is fairly strongly marked for the past tense (though something like "I'll tell him Friday that I went tomorrow" is mostly acceptable, and obviously went as an irrealis sense as well, as in "If I went there every day, I'd soon be a poor man"). —RuakhTALK 01:27, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Agrees that this needs non-gendered examples. Yuck.Amber388 (talk) 19:18, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Added some examples of a more theoretical sort, they should also clarify to some extent the use of the term better than the redundant gender markedness examples. Also, the fact is that this category isn't poorly defined in the sense of "lacking skill" or "insufficiently". This is a rubber tool for working on flexible systems, a rigid, over-defined term cannot in fact cope with natural language. Instead markedness gives a truly structuralist tool for an astounding amount of tasks, the markedness is not in fact ever "zero" (do not mistake with zero marking), that is; there is not a set that includes an unmarked form and then a number of marked forms. Rather every member of a set is assumed to be marked to some extent, the point is that the relative amount of marking varies between the members of the set, it is the least marked that is called "unmarked", after that comes the rest of the set in order of increasing markedness. --AkselGerner (talk) 23:10, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Hasn't this concept spread to sociology?
I mean, I'm no sociologist, but I hear about marked/unmarked gender/race/sexuality. Can someone who knows more write something about this?


 * I'm a social scientist and markedness certainly gets a lot of use in everyday description of social and cultural activity. However I'm not familiar with the history of how this usage came to be used more broadly outside linguistics and so I can't contribute anything in that direction. Nevertheless, the current state of the article seems bent towards technical linguistics, so I'm editing the initial summary for clarity to the larger audience of people who use the markedness construct (such as myself). That's how I came to this page today, using 'marked' and 'unmarked' in my own academic writing but wishing for a more precise idea of the term and its origins. I think the new initial summary more adequately captures the broad usage among scholars today.  PYRSMIS   22:27, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Derives from suffix marking?
The lead section currently states "The term derives from the 'marking' of a grammatical role with a suffix or other element". This is a bit beyond my area of expertise, but my recollection is that for Trubetzkoy (and then for Jakobson) the distinction was originally phonological (nasality of Russian consonants, if memory serves), not morphological. Am I misremembering or misinformed? Cnilep (talk) 12:08, 23 April 2012 (UTC)