10.13.2006

the marked post

today in sociolinguistics, we had a discussion about 'markedness.' the term originated with the prague school of linguistics (generally associated with the structuralist movement), but it seems to parallel useful concepts found in post-structuralist theory. let's explore!

according to the wikipedia article, the linguistic concept of markedness originally referred to certain phonemes that had additional or non-basic features. that is, if schwa (the vowel sound in 'putt') is central, unrounded, etc., it is unmarked in comparison to the vowel sound in 'pete', which is marked for features like 'high.' the same concept has been expanded to syntactic and semantic structures when one is considered more basic or natural.

sociolinguists have found that marked forms are generally associated with more formal discourse. for instance, in english, latin and greek derivatives are more marked than anglo-saxon forms, so 'canine' is more formal than 'dog.' i sense a certain circularity here that i'll return to later.

markedness plays another interesting role in sociolinguistics. in many cases, the unmarked term in a set of opposite terms is also the name of the category that encompasses both of those terms. for instance, 'cow' technically refers to a female bovine. but it can also be used to refer to a group of both cows and bulls. the term 'bull,' on the other hand, can only be used to refer to males, and never to a mixed-gender group. (it's an interesting example, our sociolinguistics professor points out, because it's one of the few gender examples in which the female is the unmarked term.)

in the same way, your height is never referred to as your shortness, no one ever asks 'how slow were you running?' except in extreme cases, and '___ years young' is a kind of joke, because 'height,' 'fast,' and 'old,' are the unmarked terms in their respective binaries.

i'm sure you're asking: what does all this have to do with derrida? well, in the above examples it's fairly trivial to point out that the privileging (unmarking, naturalizing) of one term is arbitrary. it is perpetuated by convention, and goodness knows why it occurs in the first place (that's what sociolinguists try to figure out... good luck, guys). but post-structuralists point out that this also occurs on a more conceptual level. for instance, speech is privileged over writing because it's seen as more natural, older, and because it requires the presence of both speaker and listener (the privileging of speech over writing, besides structuring a lot of philosophical metaphors, is why linguists study speech almost exclusively!). but all the explanatory binaries: naturalness/unnaturalness, purity/impurity, originality/derivation, presence/absence are equally conventional and arbitrary. and linking all the privileged sides of those binaries to each other is also conventional, arbitrary, and empirically untestable. so derrida points out that speech actually has all the impurity, derivation and unnaturalness of writing and that ALL signification is, in this sense, writing.

post-structuralism is often erroneously equated with relativism. undoing all conceptual binaries by demonstrating that they're founded in this linguistic way amounts to relativism only if one believes that language is immaterial. but it can be shown to have real effects in the world. the arbitrary privileging of one half of the writing/speech binary actually determines how we study linguistics. to return to a linguistic example, the difference between saying '21 years old' and '21 years young' is arbitrary, but still meaningful and important.

and i'll just quickly close with my question about markedness and formality: are marked forms more formal, or are formal forms more marked? if markedness develops through conventions of use, these connections can't really be used to predict anything (language change, patterns of reference) except how people will tend to interpret the use of certain terms.

1 comment:

Seb said...

'Tis I, Seb, who comes, rhinoceros-like, to trample the fire of your Derridian assertions!

So, it sounds like you are saying that:

(1) When we make binary distinctions, we privilege one of the components over the other, and that this is analogous to or perhaps the same as marking one of two of a pair of terms.

This seems like a good observation to me.

(2) This marking/privileging is arbitrary.

I'm not sure this is always the case. If by "arbitrary" you just mean "perpetuated by convention," that may be true. But if by "arbitrary" you mean "there's no particular reason why it makes sense to mark one over the other," I'm not convinced.

One reason why it might make sense to mark one of two items in a pair might be to reflect an actual discrepency in the frequency or salience of the referents involved. The "cow" example may be telling here: it seems like one could make the case that for cattle, the vast majority of those that cattle-domesticating humans have interacted with, and the ones who receive the most general treatment, are the females. If the information carried by the term "cow" generalizes better to all cattle than "bull", then it would make sense for the "cow" term to be unmarked.

(For comparison, and out of curiosity, consider the term "ox"--I'm not sure if it's marked or not. To me it signifies cattle used for the purposes of labor, as opposed to being used for beef or dairy. Technically, it's a castrated male cattle. What gives?)

Similarly, in a patriarchal society its possible that information carried by male pronouns generalized better to females than vice versa.

I don't have much to back up these theories, but my point is that it might be too quick to just assert that the privileging is arbitrary. Information content is real--it has real practical and cognitive consequences--and might do some explanatory work.

(3) Speech is privileged over writing

Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by 'privilege.' I'll accept this for the sake of argument.

(4) But all the explanatory binaries: naturalness/unnaturalness, purity/impurity, originality/derivation, presence/absence are equally conventional and arbitrary. and linking all the privileged sides of those binaries to each other is also conventional, arbitrary, and empirically untestable.

I want to be careful here. Are the binaries themselves arbitrary, or are the privileging of one side over the other arbitrary? The latter seems much more reasonable to me than the first.

Cognitive psychology recognizes some pretty systematic reasons for why we would form some binary distinctions and not others. Again, it comes down to information content. We tend to group together, conceptually, features of the world that are highly correlated---Eleanor Rosch famously called this "carving the world at its joints." We can speculate that this helps us process ideas more quickly.

So the distinction between short things and long things is a non-arbitrary distinction because differences in linear span have very important, practical consequences in our lives, and we need to be able to reason about them.

What this account depends on are premises about things like causality, the correlation of features of the world, and the shaping of human thought and language being determined in part by the practical needs of humans as individuals and in societies. If post-structuralism isn't relativistic or skeptical about the external world or otherwise crazy, I don't think there's much for it to disagree with here., although I'm sure you'll prove me wrong.

(5) so derrida points out that speech actually has all the impurity, derivation and unnaturalness of writing and that ALL signification is, in this sense, writing.

So I don't think this follows. Suppose I meet you halfway: let's say the privileging is arbitrary, but the binary distinctions themselves are not.

Then while it may be arbitrary to privilege speech on account of its, for example, originality (since the privileging of originality is itself arbitrary), it is not arbitrary that speech is original with respect to writing.

So to conclude that speech is actually as unoriginal as writing seems pretty fallacious to me.

(6) undoing all conceptual binaries by demonstrating that they're founded in this linguistic way amounts to relativism only if one believes that language is immaterial. but it can be shown to have real effects in the world.

To conclude, I think once again I have a fundemental disagreement with you here. Conceptual binaries are not all founded in mere convention, but rather they are founded in humanity's capacity to conceptualize which is something we've evolved, either biologically or socially, to have. Rather than being arbitrary, they capture real information about the world in a way that is relevant for us. So the "real effects on the world" of these conceptual binaries comes prior to their role in linguistic analysis; while there are real effects that are consequences of their use in language, they are not their only reason for being.

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