Cultural Markedness
Since a main component of markedness is the information content and information value of an element, some studies have taken markedness as an encoding of that which is unusual or informative. Conceptual familiarity with cultural norms provided by familiar categories creates a ground against which marked categories provide a figure, opening the way for markedness to be applied to cultural and social categorization.
As early as the 1930s Jakobson had already suggested applying markedness to all oppositions, explicitly mentioning such pairs as life/death, liberty/bondage, sin/virtue, and holiday/working day. Linda Waugh extended this to oppositions like male/female, white/black, sighted/blind, hearing/deaf, heterosexual/homosexual, right/left, fertility/barrenness, clothed/nude, and spoken language/written language. Battistella expanded this with the demonstration of how cultures align markedness values to create cohesive symbol systems, illustrating with examples based on Joseph Needham’s work. Other work has applied markedness to stylistics, music, myth.
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Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising true masculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven’t been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren’t being manly enough.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)