Marked and Unmarked Word Pairs
In terms of lexical opposites, marked form is a non-basic, often one with inflectional or derivational endings. Thus, a morphologically negative word form is marked as opposed to a positive one: happy/unhappy, honest/dishonest, fair/unfair, clean/unclean and so forth. Similarly, unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms: lion/lioness, host/hostess, automobile/automobiles, child/children. An unmarked form is also a default form. For example, the unmarked lion can refer to a male or female, while lioness is marked because it can refer only to females.
The default nature allows unmarked lexical forms to be identified even when the opposites are not morphologically related. In the pairs old/young, big/little, happy/sad, clean/dirty, the first term of each pair is taken as unmarked because it occurs generally in questions. For example, English speakers typically ask how old (big, happy, clean) … something or someone is. To use the marked term presupposes youth, smallness, unhappiness, or dirtiness.
Read more about this topic: Markedness
Famous quotes containing the words marked, unmarked and/or word:
“Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 11:44.
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