Number and Markedness: A View from Dagaare

Deliberate Markedness in Japanese Hypocoristics*

A common view in the phonological literature is that phonological alternations typically involve markedness reduction; that is, deviation from an input is basically characterized as a repair of a marked structure. Under the most extreme version of phonological theory, every output constraint is simply a reflection of a markedness hierarchy, meaning that all disparities between inputs and output...

Descriptive and Explanatory Markedness

The wide empirical coverage of two number features, [±singular] and [±augmented], is used to show that (Greenbergian) category-internal markedness, (geometric) feature markedness, and value markedness are, respectively, epiphenomenal, untenable, and too simplistically formulated to be currently evaluated.

Complex predicates: The case of serial verbs in Dagaare and Akan

Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness

Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-p...

Markedness, antisymmetry and complexity of constructions

Our concern in this paper is with the interactions between language change, language acquisition, markedness, and computational complexity of mappings between grammatical representations. We demonstrate through a computational simulation of language change that markedness can produce ‘gaps’ in the distribution of combinations of linguistic features. Certain combinations will not occur, simply b...