Markedness

1. Markedness • Unmarked categories, language, and identities: • Are thought of as “natural,” “normal,” or “ordinary” and are therefore less visible • Examples: walk; The Warriors; “a man” • Marked categories, language, and identities: • Are thought to somehow differ from the norm or be “other” • Examples: walked; The Lady Warriors; “a gay man”

4. Markedness • Unmarked categories, language, and identities: • Are thought of as “natural,” “normal,” or “ordinary” and are therefore less visible • Examples: walk; The Warriors; “a man” • Marked categories, language, and identities: • Are thought to somehow differ from the norm or be “other” • Examples: walked; The Lady Warriors; “a gay man”

5. LEVELS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE (from smallest to largest)

6. Phonology • Phonology = all the patterns in a language that directly involve sounds. • Phoneme = a single sound of a language. • Example: /s/ • These are contrastive (they change the meaning of the words they belong in): kiss vs. kill vs. kick; cat vs. rat vs. bat

7. Morphology • Rules for how “chunks” of meaning get combined into words • Morpheme: a meaningful unit of language than cannot be further divided into smaller parts. • “Free” vs. “bound” morphemes

8. Lexicon • The lexicon has to do with vocabulary. • Lexical differences would be differences in vocabulary. • Example: Taylor Swift song: “hella”

9. From: http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_50.html

10. Syntax • Rules for combining words into sentences (like grammar) • What syntactic differences can you think of between two languages you speak (e.g., Spanish and English)?

11. Intonation/Prosody • Patterns of stress and rhythm; the rise and fall of a voice • Example: “I said you should take notes” • “I said you should take notes.” • “I said you should take notes.” • “I said you should take notes.” • Another example: uptalk