What does "marked" mean in a verbal context?

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Stirling Bartholomew
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Joined: August 9th, 2012, 4:19 pm

Re: What does "marked" mean in a verbal context?

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

A. Kirk[1] has a long discussion of this issue, pages and pages.

Definitions of markedness differ immensely in the literature (see Haspelmath
2006 for a summary of twelve senses of markedness, and a critique of the term). I
discuss three of these definitions of markedness that can be applied to the domain of
word order in 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3. While some of them refer to surface orders, some of
them refer to syntactic structures. In 2.4 I discuss the role of pragmatics, or
information structure in determining basic word order.

[1]Kirk, Allison Word order and information structure in New Testament Greek
Utrecht 2012-11-21, p 23ff. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/20157
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
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Re: What does "marked" mean in a verbal context?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I have to say that I suspect that some claims in the literature that the aorist is the "unmarked" tense (or aspect) has to do with etymologizing the term ἀόριστος as "un-defined" or something like that.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
RandallButh
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Joined: May 13th, 2011, 4:01 am

Re: What does "marked" mean in a verbal context?

Post by RandallButh »

You may be right about etymology with some.
If so, one should say that they got the right answér accidentally through an unreliable process. On the other hand, a semantic analysis leads to calling the aorist 'perfective' within a linguistic grid. Perfective itself is more central, basic category than imperfective crosslinguistically and finally the older Greek verb stems show aorist as central, basic, to which the continuative (παρατατικος) is a development. (compare λαβ λαμβαν and θε τιθε).
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