10 votes

What is markedness?

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 ...
John Cowan's user avatar
5 votes

Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?

First, it is important to be clear on what "most basic form" as described above covers. One notion is "structurally simplest", that is, "having the fewest added things". The other is "phonologically ...
user6726's user avatar
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5 votes

What is markedness?

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 ...
user6726's user avatar
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4 votes

How can a syllable be marked?

This originates in linguistics with Trubetzkoy, who spoke of distinctive "marks" (in the sense of "indication"). -s is a "mark" of plurality, also d has a "mark" of voicing. You may be interested in ...
user6726's user avatar
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4 votes

What is markedness?

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 ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
2 votes

Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?

Probably this confusion is familiar within Indo-European linguistics. If we use the concept 'root' instead of 'base' we will understand this issue more accurately. In Indo-European languages, as far ...
Tsutsu's user avatar
  • 1,068
1 vote

Optimality Theory, voiceless plosives become aspirated in English

This can be disposed of with a contrast-enhancement constraints, which makes the output of /p/ vs. /b/ more perceptually salient (there being more phonetic cues to identify the distinction when ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 83.1k
1 vote

Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?

You could say that in Proto-indoeuropean this might have been the case and there are indications of this in some later languages like Ancient Greek, however this is definitely debatable given the ...
Eleshar's user avatar
  • 2,363
1 vote

What is markedness?

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 ...
اضحك معنا laugh with us's user avatar

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