linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, a marker is a free or bound

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as

clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

s or

inflectional In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definit ...

affixes In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

. In analytic languages and

agglutinative language An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to rem ...

s, markers are generally easily distinguished. In

fusional language Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. ...

s and

polysynthetic language In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able ...

s, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word '' amō'' ("I love") is marked by suffix '' -ō'' for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Analytic languages tend to have a relatively limited number of markers. Markers should be distinguished from the linguistic concept of markedness. An ''unmarked'' form is the basic "neutral" form of a word, typically used as its dictionary

lemma Lemma may refer to: Language and linguistics * Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word * Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered Science and mathematics * Lemma (botany), ...

, such as—in English—for nouns the singular (e.g. ''cat'' versus ''cats''), and for verbs the infinitive (e.g. ''to eat'' versus ''eats'', ''ate'' and ''eaten''). Unmarked forms (e.g. the

nominative case In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Eng ...

in many languages) tend to be less likely to have markers, but this is not true for all languages (compare

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

). Conversely, a marked form may happen to have a zero affix, like the genitive plural of some nouns in Russian (e.g. сапо́г). In some languages, the same forms of a marker have multiple functions, such as when used in different cases or

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...

s (for example '' -īs'' in Latin).

References

* Maddieson, Ian. "Locus of Marking: Whole-Language Typology", in Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.) ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'', pp. 106–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. . * Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Linguistic morphology Linguistics terminology {{ling-stub

See also

Related topics

Types of marking

References