What is Markedness

According to Roman Jakobson, “the general meaning of a marked category states the presence of a certain property A, the general meaning of the corresponding unmarked category states nothing about the presence of A and is used chiefly but not exclusively to indicate the absence of A (quoted in Greenberg, 1966, p. 25). For example, in some environments, actor is to actress as “male thespian” is to “female thespian.” However, in other environments, actress is neutralized by the term actor because actress can only refer to female thespians. In addition, actress is morphologically the more complex of the two terms, requiring the addition of an extra morpheme. For this reason, within the terms of the unmarked/marked distinction, actor is unmarked, whereas actress is marked (Clark & Clark, 1978, p. 231, Greenberg, 1966, p.26). In narrative fictions, an extremely important distinction may be made between chronologically ordinary narratives such as romances and marked order narratives such as detective fictions and Gothic horror stories. There is also the important secondary distinction between the marked character and the other characters, who are all unmarked (Murphy, 2004, 2005b).

Markedness theory in CS presumes power differentials and involves the sociolinguistic desire of the speaker to shift power, and looks for the advantages in the affordances of the “shifted to” language.

A relationship between elements of phonological class based on their degree of complexity.