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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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