A zero-marking language is one with no grammatical marks on the dependents or the modifiers or the

heads A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals m ...

or nuclei that show the relationship between different constituents of a phrase. Pervasive zero marking is very rare, but instances of zero marking in various forms occur in quite a number of

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s. Vietnamese and Indonesian are two national languages listed in the

World Atlas of Language Structures The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural ( phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-R ...

as having zero-marking. In many East and Southeast Asian languages, such as Thai and Chinese, the head

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

and its dependents are not marked for any arguments or for the

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

s' roles in the sentence. On the other hand, possession is marked in such languages by the use of clitic particles between possessor and possessed. Some languages, such as many dialects of

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

, use a similar process, called juxtaposition, to indicate possessive relationships. In Arabic, two nouns next to each other could indicate a possessed-possessor construction: ' "Maryam's books" (literally "books Maryam"). In Classical and

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA), terms used mostly by linguists, is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; occasionally, it also re ...

, however, the second noun is in the genitive case, as in '. Zero-marking, when it occurs, tends to show a strong relationship with word order. Languages in which zero-marking is widespread are almost all subject–verb–object, perhaps because verb-medial order allows two or more

s to be recognized as such much more easily than subject–object–verb, object–subject–verb, verb–subject–object, or verb–object–subject order, for which two nouns might be adjacent and their role in a sentence possibly thus confused. It has been suggested that verb-final languages may be likely to develop verb-medial order if marking on nouns is lost.

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. {{ISBN, 0-19-925591-1.

External links

WALS Feature/Chapter 25: Locus of Marking: Whole-language Typology
Linguistic typology Zero (linguistics)

See also

References

External links