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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.
According to Myers-Scotton, for any communicative situation there exists an unmarked, expected RO set and a marked, differential one. In choosing a code the speaker evaluates the markedness of their potential choices, determined by the social forces at work in their community, and decides either to follow or reject the normative model.
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 ...
In some DOM languages where only pronominal direct objects are marked, such as English, direct objects have distinct allomorphs rather than an affix (e.g., the English first person subject I has the form me when a direct object). In non-DOM languages, by contrast, direct objects are uniformly marked in a single way.
An example of differential agent marking that is affected by information structure is Tibetan. In Central Lhasa Tibetan, an agent in a transitive clause can either be marked with ergative marking or unmarked. [15] When the agent is a topic, which is the most common role for agents cross-linguistically, [1] it is normally unmarked, as in (5a ...
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In linguistic typology, marked nominative alignment is an unusual type of morphosyntactic alignment similar to, and often considered a subtype of, a nominative–accusative alignment. In a prototypical nominative–accusative language with a grammatical case system like Latin , the object of a verb is marked for accusative case , and the ...