A SILLY CONFUSION ABOUT "MARKEDNESS" 
BY WRITERS ON THAT SUBJECT

Charles-James N. Bailey

© 1998 by Orchid Land Publications
[5-1-99]

      This writing is not about the confusion that many professionals make between marking/markedness and markering/markerdness.  The former refers to the character of a context--i.e. a category or an environment--and also to items within such context; the latter, to an audible (in writing:  visible) item--usually an affix or process [e.g. umlaut]).   Thus, what is a marked word order in a given language may marker a marked context--interrogation or the imperative category.  (In intelligent usage, marke[r]dness does not depend on frequencies or other misguided criteria, but on what implies what and [barring reversals in marked contexts] what occurs earlier and later in linguistic development.
      If a failure to make the foregoing distinction is disasterous and confusing enough, there is yet a mistake that is worse, viz. the confusion of marked contexts with marked items within such contexts.  The situation arises when writers on the subject remark with a naive misunderstanding of their subject, "If marked items tend to change to unmarked items, why don't all sounds and forms become just [a]--the most unmarked sound?"   The implication is in effect a denial of the fact that there will always be marked CONTEXTS (e.g. emphasis or interrogation or negation) that don't change their markedness in time!   (Under relevant conditions, however, certain contexts may be more marked in one language than in another, though in general marking values of items in contexts are universal.  See the example of word order above.)   What can become "less marked" is an item IN any such context--more marked or less marked.  Since W. Mayerthaler's principle of constructional iconicity quite reasonably states that linguistic naturalness is enhanced when what is more marked is more markered--and conversely--and since there will always be more and less-marked contexts in languages, it follows that there will always be more-marked and less-marked items to differentiate different contexts.  Contexts cannot just be willy-nilly conflated with developing items that marker marked contexts. 
     Of course, other factors are also at work in keeping sounds distinct.  When we unmark a sound in one context (say, by deleting a marked sound in a consonant cluster), we alter the overall structure or form in such a way that sounds that had been adjacent the segment we have deleted can now become more or less marked than they were previously.   But deletion is a very tricky category that can mislead the naive linguist.  In fact, it deserves a doctoral thesis.