Talk:Marker (linguistics)

Problematic claims for Latin amō
ˈ"For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word amo ("I love") is marked by suffix -o for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense."

Well, sort of, but overtly? That puts quite a heavy load on little ō, and raises the question of how to analyze future amābō, in which the ō can't be marking present -- the claim has to be that ō of amō and ō of amābō are incidentally of identical form. The concept of unmarked default form is missing here, yet alive and well if cat is interpretable as singular not because it's marked singular, but because it's not marked as plural. Nice example for default of gender (and number if pursued) in modern Lombard: /aˈmik/ 'male friend, sg.' vs. /aˈmika/ 'female friend, sg.' How do we know that the /aˈmik/ is male? Because he's not an /aˈmika/. Etc. --47.32.20.133 (talk) 18:20, 2 July 2018 (UTC)