Markedness

The notion of markedness is from the Prague school of the 1920s and originally referred only to the phonology. However, it can be extended to all areas of linguistics the concept. Thus, a particular phenomenon is unmarked when it looks more natural and is made up of simple. The unmarked form acts as a basic form which can be derived from other shapes. These other forms are referred to as labeled. For example: the term student has long been used as a gender- non-specific term. The term student is in its use of a priori limited to women. The ratio between the two terms could be seen as unmarked (student) versus marked ( Student in ), respectively. This ratio can be found in all fields of linguistics, for example, one could apply the concept of markedness on case systems. In German, thus the nominative would be unmarked, while the other cases ( genitive, dative and accusative ) are marked.

Since the 1920s, the term will be extended on individual theories of linguistics, such as: on the transformational grammar. According to this theory all languages ​​are based on the same universal grammar; but not all grammatical phenomena must necessarily be realized in all languages. Phenomena, which occur in certain languages ​​, but not in others, is called marks. The proceeds from the idea that they are unmarked in the Universal Grammar.

In the naturalness theory markedness is the antonym of naturalness.

A marked phenomenon of Indo-European languages ​​( with the exception of most Slavic languages), for example, the article; a marked phenomenon in many Asian languages ​​is the Numeralklassifikator.

One of the big problems for translators and in particular for machine translation is in a language that has a marked phenomenon hineinzuübersetzen from a language that does not have this phenomenon. Noun in Finnish or Japanese for example have no items: How do you decide when translation into German, whether, and if so, which article ( finite or indefinite ) is needed?