Jakobsonian Tradition
The work of Cornelius van Schooneveld, Edna Andrews, Rodney Sangster, Yishai Tobin and others on ‘semantic invariance’ (different general meanings reflected in the contextual specific meanings of features) has further developed the semantic analysis of grammatical items in terms of marked and unmarked features. Other semiotically-oriented work has investigated the isomorphism of form and meaning with less emphasis on invariance, including the efforts of Henning Andersen, Michael Shapiro, and Edwin Battistella. Shapiro and Andrews have especially made connections between the semiotic of C. S. Peirce and markedness, treating it as “as species of interpretant” in Peirce’s sign-object-interpretant triad.
Functional linguists such as Thomas Givon have suggested that markedness is related to cognitive complexity—‘in terms of attention, mental effort or processing time.’ And linguistic ‘naturalists’ view markedness relations in terms of the ways in which extralinguistic principles of perceptibility and psychological efficiency determine what is natural in language. Linguist Willi Mayerthaler, for example, defines unmarked categories as those ‘in agreement with the typical attributes of the speaker.’
Read more about this topic: Markedness
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“The tradition I cherish is the ideal this country was built upon, the concept of religious pluralism, of a plethora of opinions, of tolerance and not the jihad. Religious war, pooh. The war is between those who trust us to think and those who believe we must merely be led.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)