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Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology
Edited by Bridget D. Samuels
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 241] 2017
► pp. 1–22

Chapter 1
Markedness in substance-free and substance-dependent phonology

The true nature of “markedness” in the history of phonology is highly uncertain, in that the term is used to refer to a wide array of facts about language, and there is little agreement over what the term even refers to, much less whether it is a valid concept. This paper reviews certain applications of that concept in phonology, in search of some unity behind “markedness”. I show that “markedness” is about two unrelated things: formal properties of language, and functional probability of occurrence. Much effort has been put into forcing these two conceptions under a single computation umbrella, and that effort bears significant responsibility for the development of substance-dependent theories of grammar. As for whether “markedness” is a worthy topic of investigation, it is argued that the original formal question underlying markedness is still worth scrutiny in the theory of grammar: what is the nature of phonological features?

Keywords: acquisition, computation, features, naturalness, neutralization, phoneme, privativity, typology, underspecification, universals
Article outline
  • 1.From Trubetzkoy to generative phonology
  • 2.The concept of markedness in generative phonology
    • 2.1Simplicity, naturalness and markedness
    • 2.2The impotence of markedness theory
    • 2.3The epistemological basis of the markedness argument
    • 2.4Contemporary concepts of markedness
  • 3.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.241.01odd
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