Markedness

This entry summarizes the concept of ‘markedness’ originally postulated for the new science of phonology, first discussed by Count Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1931a; 1931b; 1939) and Roman Jakobson (1929; 1931a; 1931b; 1936) of the Prague School at the International Congress of Linguistics in the Hague in 1928. The theoretical and methodological implications of phonology and markedness have become the subject of a vast literature (Vachek 1964; Waugh 1976; Sangster 1982; Viel 1984; Liberman 2001; Tobin 2007). Markeness has been adopted and adapted for all levels of language by most, if not all, twentieth century linguistic theories, including transformational-generative grammar (Kean 1980; Belletti et al. 1981; Eckman et al. 1986; Tomić 1989).