Markedness

In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. The typical form or meaning of a term is said to be unmarked versus the nontypical marked form or meaning.

In linguistics, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms. Markedness can apply to phonological, grammatical, and semantic oppositions, such as honest (unmarked) as opposed to dishonest (marked). The term derives from the marking of a grammatical role with a suffix or other element, but has been extended to semantic distinctions where there is no morphological difference.

In social sciences more broadly, markedness is used to distinguish two meanings of the same term, where one is common usage (unmarked sense) and the other is specialized to a certain cultural context (marked sense).

In psychology, the social science concept of markedness is quantified as a measure of how much one variable is marked as a predictor or possible cause of another, and is also known as Δp (deltaP) in simple two-choice cases. See confusion matrix for more details.

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