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In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
Myers-Scotton gives the following example to illustrate the markedness model, involving a clerk and customer at a bank in Nairobi for whom the unmarked code choice is Swahili. The customer begins speaking in the unmarked Swahili and later switches to Luo , their shared ethnic language, to index social solidarity with the clerk, trying to ...
Unmarked forms (e.g. the nominative case in many languages) tend to be less likely to have markers, but this is not true for all languages (compare Latin). Conversely, a marked form may happen to have a zero affix, like the genitive plural of some nouns in Russian (e.g. сапо́г).
In a language with morphological case marking, an S and an A may both be unmarked or marked with the nominative case while the O is marked with an accusative case (or sometimes an oblique case used for dative or instrumental case roles also), as occurs with nominative -us and accusative -um in Latin: Juli us venit "Julius came"; Juli us Brut um ...
The Hatoma dialect contains two "tonal categories", denoted as marked and unmarked. Words of the marked class are analyzed as being "high from the syllable containing the second mora" and unmarked words begin from a low pitch but end with a low pitch. [16] "Peripheral tone classes" are also noted in certain nouns and adverb. [16]
A number of languages have both ergative and accusative morphology. A typical example is a language that has nominative-accusative marking on verbs and ergative–absolutive case marking on nouns. Georgian has an ergative alignment, but the agent is only marked with the ergative case in the perfective aspect (also known as the "aorist screeve ...
In the following example from Amharic, the verb can be head-marked for S, A, and O. Both S in the intransitive clause and A in the transitive clause are marked by the same affix (-ə ‘3SG.M’), while O in the transitive clause is marked by a different affix (-w ‘3SG.M.O’). [4] Amharic intransitive
OSV is rarely used in unmarked sentences, which use a normal word order without emphasis. Most languages that use OSV as their default word order come from the Amazon basin, such as Xavante, Jamamadi, Apurinã, Warao, Kayabí and Nadëb. [1] Mizo language also uses OSV in unmarked sentences. Here is an example from Apurinã: [1]