Markedness

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Markedness is a typological linguistic notion roughly equivalent to the "typicality" of a single feature. A language feature that is highly marked is atypical; one that is less marked is common (but, depending on the amount of possibilities, not necessarily overwhelmingly so). When the least marked choice in a set involves the absense of a feature, it is called unmarked.

Markedness can only be compared to other similar features; it does not make sense to ask, for example, which of contour tone and comitative case is the more marked, as one is a pattern of prosody (within the domain of phonology) and the other is a case (within the domain of morphology).

Markedness is also qualitative: it can not be quantified, outside of the percentage of occurrence in a given sample of languages.

Examples of markedness

"A > B" is used here to signify that A is more marked than B, while ">>" signifies "very much more marked".

• Grammatical alignment
  • Transitive >> tripartite >> ergative > accusative
• Phonation:
  • For obstruents, voiced > unvoiced
  • For sonorants, unvoiced > voiced
  • Aspirated > unaspirated
  • Glottalized fricative > glottalized sonorant > glottalized stop
• Place of articulation:
  • Coronal consonants are the least marked, together with glottal
  • Uvular > velar
  • Palatalized > unpalatalized (likewise for velarization, labialization, etc.)
  • Labialized coronal > labialized labial >> labialized velar
• Word order
  • OS > SO