Markedness - Background in The Prague School

Background in The Prague School

While the idea of linguistic asymmetry predated the actual coining of the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ the modern concept of markedness originated in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy as a means of characterizing binary oppositions. Both sound and meaning were analyzed into systems of binary distinctive features. As Edwin Battistella explains “Binarism suggests symmetry and equivalence in linguistic analysis; markedness adds the idea of hierarchy.” Trubetzkoy and Jakobson analyzed phonological oppositions such as nasal versus non-nasal as defined as the presence versus the absence of nasality; the presence of the feature, nasality, was marked; its absence, non-nasality, was unmarked. For Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, binary phonological features formed part of a universal feature alphabet applicable to all languages. In his 1932 article ‘Structure of the Russian Verb,’ Jakobson extended the concept to grammatical meanings in which the marked element ‘announces the existence of A’ while the unmarked element ‘does not announce the existence of A, i.e., does not state whether A is present or not’. Forty years later, Jakobson described language by saying that “every single constituent of a linguistic system is built on an opposition of two logical contradictories: the presence of an attribute (‘markedness’) in contraposition to its absence (‘unmarkedness’).”

In his 1941 Child Language, Aphasia, and Universals of Language, Jakobson also suggested that phonological markedness played a role in language acquisition and loss. Drawing on existing studies of acquisition and aphasia, Jakobson suggested a mirror image relationship determined by a universal feature hierarchy of marked and unmarked oppositions. Today many still see Jakobson’s theory of phonological acquisition as identifying useful tendencies.