History and Philosophy of Linguistics Reading group Next meeting: Monday, 22 October, 46pm, Woolley N408
Reading: Martin Haspelmath (2006). Against markedness (and what to replace it with). J. Linguistics 42: 2570. This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms marked¹ and unmarked¹ have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes : markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term markedness¹ is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of markedness¹. For more information & the reading see http://groups.google.com.au/group/HPLinguistics Enquiries: [email protected] All welcome!
_______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 945 subscribers now served. To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
