I am confused about the meaning of markedness. From the Wikipedia page I read:
The dominant term is known as the 'unmarked' term and the other, secondary one is the 'marked' term. In other words, it is the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit (i.e. the unmarked term) compared to the unit's possible "irregular" forms (i.e. the marked term).
I believe that "dominant" means more frequent, but is it dominant inside one language or considering all natural languages together?
An example, though probably not a very good one, is "lioness" vs. "lion". "Lion" can refer to either male or female lions, whereas "lioness" refers to only female lions. In this example "lioness" is marked and "lion" is unmarked. This is because "lion" is the more general term.
Another example is "young" vs. "old". Here "old" is less obviously unmarked, while "young" is marked. This is a better example. Normally, when I ask a question, I ask "How old is Jim?", because "old" is the unmarked term. This is rather general. I do not appear to be making a presumption about Jim. Conversely, if I asked "How young is Jim?", that presupposes that Jim is young. This is because "young" is the marked term.
So marked vs. unmarked means that two terms with contrasting meaning are asymmetrical in their usage and meaning, and that one of them is more general and dominant.
Of course markedness varies across languages, there are surely some in which "young" is unmarked.
In 2005, Martin Haspelmath published a paper called "Against Markedness (and what to replace it with)" which defines twelve different senses of marked, markedness and arguing that this polysemy obfuscates rather than helping and should be eliminated. Unfortunately, he seems to have been a voice crying in the wilderness so far.
The twelve senses:
There is a book edited by B. Samuels entitled Beyond markedness in formal phonology which addresses the question. Basically, this is a case where the term is taken to be primary, and the referent is taken to be "open to discovery" – which is a nice way to say that it doesn't have a fixed meaning, and depending on school of thought, it refers to unrelated facts. Trubetzkoy's imported the concept of a "mark" into linguistics, and used it to refer to a distinguishing property that a linguistic unit has. In phonology, it was intimately tied to privative features, where a voiced consonant might "have the mark" and voiceless ones might lack it. Subsequent developments retained the term but radically altered what it was about. This was especially necessary when Trubetzkoy's privative analysis was replaced with Jakobsonian binary features, whereby all oppositions become equipollent. The nature of being "marked" then had to change, and it changed in the direction of being "more basic" versus "less basic", with a presumed acquisitional bias in favor of the "more basic" value.
Greenberg explicitly tied the notion of "marked" with frequency of occurrence, and Chomsky and Halle in SPE followed up on this assumption by creating a formal theory of "markedness" whereby rules were simpler to express if they produced unmarked results – consequently, the thinking was, unmarked outputs will be more frequent. Generally speaking, since that time the term has been taken to mean "happens most often", and the puzzle then is, what is the nature of the fact that causes something to be more frequent (i.e. "unmarked"). SPE held that it was a list of context-sensitive specifications that come "for free". More recently, "markedness" has been taken in OT to mean "a configuration that is to be avoided".
It is some note, IMO, that there is negligible interaction between the concept of markedness in phonology, and its use in semantics.
Perhaps markedness is best explained in terms of surprisal. Frequency alone is not a very good estimator for surprisal because it ignores all kind of context and uses a unigram language model. More refined language models and external knowledge (e.g., script knowledge) give more precise number for surprisal. Surprisal is correlated to processing difficulty as psycholinguistic studies show.
So, in the terms of the wikipedia article in the quoted version, "dominant" translates to "least surprising" or "having the lowest surprisal".
Marked and unmarked terms are frequently getting used in binary oppositions. It means a term isn't equal in its weight, but the one (unmarked) is neutral or more positive in contrast to the opposite term. As Geoffery leech observes, where there's a contrast between two or more terms, tenses or cases, one among them is marked if it has some extra 'affix' in contrast to the unmarked one which doesn't contain any marker. for instance, the cat is an unmarked and neutral term while cats are marked with a suffix -s, similarly actor may be an unmarked term while the actress is a marked term with an affix -ess, also polite may be a positive term in contrast to its negative term 'impolite'. generally, the plural of nouns in English is marked term (books) as compared to the singular (book) for more information read this article https://www.ta3alem-online.com/2020/02/marked-and-unmarked-terms.html
