A brief introduction of markedness phenomena in English lexical semantics

Abstract

In the course of lexical and semantics， after the chapter of sense relation and semantic field， the syntagmatic relation and paradigmatic relation have introduced. The syntagmatic/paradigmatic distinction is one of Saussurean distinction that have been of great importance in the development of structuralism. The paradigmatic association can be synonyms， antonyms， hyponyms or any other associative words in the same word class with the original one. So we know that between the synonym comprehend and understand ， understand is more frequently used， and the same goes for the antonym old and young ， why people always said “how old are you？” instead of “how young are you？”. These may be explained by the markedness theory. In the examples above， understand and old are unmarked words while comprehend and young are marked words. A brief introduction has been covered in this paper which includes markedness in morphology， markedness in semantics and markedness in pragmatics. And the focus lies the analysis on some reasons why some words are unmarked and others are marked from perspectives of economic principals， politeness principals and social cultural factors.

Markedness and the \"economic principles\"

Numerous language fact is a self-debugging result of language structure for the realization of language function. So one of the reasons of markedness phenomenon is related to \"economic principles\" in communication. This is an adaptation strategies for human to processing information in an economic way. Vocabulary of human language is not simply a reflection of the reality of the external world， because human cognition is a selection and processing filter， which "means that it will deal with the perceived external things according to its advantage and processing minimal information in language use. The use of common unmarked words or short form is for economic or labor-saving considerations， it is the so-called， \"Bradford-Zipf Law\"， for example， singular noun is more frequently used than plural form， so it has a simpler structure， boys has a plural marker”-s”， so it’s a marked words. Again， compared with the passive voice， active voice is more often used， so the structure is simpler with no marks. Take dog / bitch for example， "dog： + male or + male + （- male） ; bitch：- male， the unmarked item dog covers two values with a wide semantic range and a wide distribution. The use of unmarked words is just like the default option in the computer system and will save energy..

Markedness and \"politeness principle\"

in the field of pragmatics， linguists Leech proposed \"politen6ss principle\" on the basis of Grice’s \"cooperative principle\"， the essence of \"cooperative principle\" is to minimize the criticism of others and try to increase the recognition of others. When the circumstance is unclear people "always assume that others are normal and right. This relatively secure communication strategy contributes to our smooth and effective conversation. So this kind of words will be commonly used with a wider distribution and tend to be unmarked words. For example， when someone’s looks was asked about， in order to show friendship and respect， people would choose the word beautiful to ask. The word beautiful in How beautiful your wife？ is unmarked. Another example is when people use How fresh are your fruit today？ when they are going to buy some fruits. The word fresh here is unmarked. But sometimes the situation is more complex， such as， when people asked about a newborn baby， they will usually say How fat is she？ （ fat here is unmarked）; But in modern society， the same question is generally not used ask a young lady. Fat in the former circumstance is used to express cute and healthy but for a young lady， to be said fat will make them feel resentment and disrespect and fat here is unmarked. I believe that this is \"the nature of the different markers in the same word in a different sentence. So，whether a word is marked or not sometimes depends on the contexts. And this is the result of \"politen6ss principle\" by which people will always choose the safest way to communicate.

Conclusion

Markedness phenomena are widely distributed in many aspects of language from everyday conversation to literature works， especially in lexicology. For the explanation of markedness， this paper mainly focus on pragmatic theory， other respects such as cognitive factors are also worthy researching， this is because language people used to communicate is the result of human cognition， and the distinction between marked and unmarked is also a result of human cognition. What’s more， a lot of people have claimed that markedness can contribute to vocabulary teaching， this is reasonable for markedness is penetrated from morphology to pragmatics， maybe we could take unmarked words which are general frequent and easy as the foundation of marked ones which are relatively specific and complex. Maybe in this way headache vocabulary memorizing will be more simple.