The Logic of Markedness

by Edwin L. Battistella (contributor)

Theories of language espoused by linguists during much of this century have assumed that there is a hierarchy to the elements of language such that certain constructions, rules, and features are unmarked while others are marked; "play" for example, is unmarked or neutral, while "played" or "player" is marked. This opposition, referred to as markedness, is one of the concepts which both Chomskyan generative grammar and Jakobsonian structuralism appear to share, yet which each tradition has treated differently. Battistella studies the historical development of the concept of markedness in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson, its importation into generative linguistics, and its subsequent development within Chomsky's "principles and parameters" framework. He traces how structuralist and generative linguistics have drawn on and expanded the notion of markedness, both as a means of characterizing linguistic constructs and as a theory of the innate language faculty.

Genres: Linguistics

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. He is the author of six books and over fifty articles.

Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford University Press, 2014 [in production]) analyzes the public apologies of presidents, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, situating the apology within American popular culture and showing how language creates sincere or insincere apologies, why we choose to apologize or don’t, and how our efforts to say we are sorry succeed or fail.

A Year of New Words (Literary Ashland Press, 2013) is a short series of essays and a glossary reporting on my 2012 project of making up a word a day.

Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others? (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Do You Make These Mistakes in English? The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School (Oxford University Press, 2009) are about language attitudes. Bad Language was a cultural history of language attitudes—why we consider some uses and words better than others. It was named one of the Chicago Tribune’s “10 Best Books on Language” in 2005 and it was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 2006.

Do You Make These Mistakes in English? was a cultural history of the self-education movement focusing on the life of writer Sherwin Cody, an entrepreneur of English whose long-running correspondence course invited the upwardly mobile to spend just fifteen minutes a day improving their English. It made the Library Journal’s 2009 list of Best Sellers in Language.

Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (SUNY Press, 1989) and The Logic of Markedness (Oxford University Press, 1996) are about linguistic theory, specifically the structuralist concept of asymmetry between opposites and its later development in generative grammar.

Battistella served as Dean of the School of Arts & Letters at Southern Oregon University from 2000-2006 and as interim Provost from 2007-2008. He is on the board of directors of Oregon Humanities, the state humanities council, and on the editorial board of The Oregon Encyclopedia, and the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. He has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR’s Jefferson Public Radio, for C-Span2’s Book TV and in the NEH magazine Humanities.

He also moderates the Literary Ashland blog and twitter feed.