Markedness, participation and grammatical paradigms: Jakobson and Hjelmslev revisited

Abstract

The topic of this paper is markedness theory as initially developed in early works by Jakobson and Hjelmslev. The aim is to show how this early theory is (still) useful in the analysis of language-particular grammatical paradigms, and, further, to investigate which aspects of this early theory of markedness might still benefit from further refinements. One major point of this paper is to reinforce the notion of participation (a term originally suggested by Hjelmslev) as crucial in the understanding of markedness theory. Another major point is to show how the markedness relations of a paradigm depend not only on the members of the paradigm in question but also on the contexts in which the members of the paradigm are being used. Examples from Modern Danish grammar are given as illustration. The approach is functional-structural in the sense of Engberg-Pedersen et al. (1996).