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Local and General Markedness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Peter Meijes Tiersma
Peter Meijes Tiersma*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

The work of Jakobson—and later, of Greenberg—has developed the notion of MORPHOLOGICAL MARKEDNESS. In this view, certain morphological categories (e.g. noun singulars) are considered unmarked or more basic in relation to others (e.g. noun plurals). It is shown here that there are some principled exceptions to the general markedness conventions. One example of such LOCAL MARKEDNESS, as this type of markedness reversal will be called, is that nouns whose referents naturally occur in groups or pairs show many of the effects of being unmarked in the plural. The consequences of such local markedness in terms of language acquisition, paradigm regularization, lexical borrowing, and the formation of double morphology are explored in some detail.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1982 , pp. 832 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by Linguistic Society of America

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