#markedness

There is no end To where we begin Remind me again how Wet soft light embraces All the traces of what is Left and what we promise To defend

Inside the core A graceless wind of pain Departs to find it’s way out Into outer waves that send the Differences where melancholy leaves A markedness made absent to retreat Into our satiated breeze

Upon the face of a rose Lands the heart of a bee Where I find…

“The ‘invisibility’ of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its “unmarked” and “naturalized” status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned.”

- Rachel Carroll, Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction

Heterosexuality is unmarked in that it is the default or typical case. When first starting a book, tv show, or movie, consumers tend to perceive all of the characters as straight unless a character indicates otherwise. Heterosexual characters rarely say “I’m straight” or verbalize the fact that they are attracted only to the opposite sex.

“Heterosexual identity is a different kind of thing from gay or lesbian identity. The two are not just different but equal possibilities; rather, one is marked with respect to the other. No one wears a button saying ‘happy to be heterosexual’. No one comes out as straight, or claims to speak on behalf of the ‘straight community’. As the unmarked sexual identity, we might not expect heterosexuality to be signaled in the same way as homosexuality, linguistically or otherwise.”

- Deborah Cameron, Straight-talking: the sociolinguistics of heterosexuality

Queer sexual orientations, such as homosexuality or bisexuality, are marked in that they are atypical and not the default case. Fictional media have to depict or verbalize a queer character’s sexual orientation in order for the character to be perceived that way. Markedness is not intrinsically negative, but the markedness of being queer in our society leads to the marginalization and oppression of LGBT people.

Excerpt :

Many oppositional adjectives like hot and cold, or young and old, have no meaning whatsoever until someone puts them on a scale. Sometimes the scale is implied, sometimes it’s explicitly stated. 

Example:

“It’s cold outside” implies that it’s colder than normal, or it’s colder than you’d like. It tells us absolutely nothing, however, about the actual temperature outside.

“She’s twelve years old” helpfully includes the scale and tells us something about the actual age of the girl (she’s twelve). 

These binary oppositions generally have a marked word and an unmarked word. These are technical linguistic terms for fairly simple concepts. “Binary opposition” means a set of two words where one refers to the opposite of the other: up and down, hot and cold. An “unmarked” word is a word used to describe a position on the spectrum of the binary opposition which doesn’t cause you to wonder why I used that word. A “marked” word, then, is a word used to describe a position on the scale of the binary opposition which causes you to wonder why I used that word. 

I said these were simple concepts. I was not lying. Sometimes, I get the impression that technical language is specifically invented to distance n00bs, which to me should be some sort of crime, at least in the field of philosophy. I use these words even though I don’t like them. Don’t ask me why. I’m complicated; I have layers.

Example:

Let’s say the “spectrum of binary opposition” is human age. This spectrum will run from zero to around a hundred, and your two words will be “young” and “old”. 

“He is eighty years old” is the unmarked form. This means there is nothing inherent about this sentence that would cause you to wonder why I phrased it like that. It doesn’t carry any extra meaning apart from what it says.

“He is eighty years young” is the marked form. There is a reason to ask why I used the word “young” instead of “old”. It carries some extra meaning apart from what it says. In this case, I am pretending that age is a state of mind, and that being old isn’t that bad (when clearly it is, or I wouldn’t feel the need to use the marked form).

Markedness is a fascinating feature, not just of linguistics, but of psychology and sociology too. There is a sense of “the default” in these words which is often confused for racism, sexism, or some other Bad Thing. 

Example: 

A book refers to a gender-neutral example character as “him” throughout. This is taken as an example of sexism. However, the male words have long been established as the unmarked form for characters whose sex is unknown; the word “mankind” has always unambiguously included women.

Referring to a gender-neutral example character as “she” is a marked form, and is specifically designed to convey information not contained in the sentence itself. Perhaps you want people to know that you are a feminist, or that you don’t like conforming to expectations simply because they are expected of you. Whatever the reason, the effect is to take the reader out of the sentence, thereby possibly diminishing the impact of your writing (unless you’re aiming for this disjoint, in which case, well done). 

Example:

Let’s say a card game manual has not established any sexes or genders, but includes the line: “The player counts her cards.” Whether you intend it or not, the inclusion of “her” is going to trip people up, and they will mentally digest this as “I’m a feminist, and the player counts the cards.”

Some authors try to straddle the fence and use “they”, which can work, but it more usually takes the reader out of the narrative because readers are not accustomed to seeing plurals refer to singulars (unless you’re Elizabeth II). 

You are entitled, as a human being, to have any opinion you like on this, but know that markedness runs deep in our language. One of these will sound more natural than the other two, no matter how you personally feel about it:

Someone goes to town and he comes back with some bread. 

Someone goes to town and she comes back with some bread.

Someone goes to town and they come back with some bread.

Keep in mind, again, that this only applies to gender-neutral characters; if you have any reasons to suspect the gender/sex of the person, none of this applies.

You are communicating things all the time, through the words you choose and the words you do not choose. Be aware of the choices you’re making. 

However, in terms of overt coding, all the examples I know of have animate as the overtly coded category. That is, animate is the one marked by an affix, while inanimate is marked by zero. And that’s associated with markedness, not unmarkedness. For comparison, plural as opposed to singular shows all three markedness characteristics (lower text frequency, lower inflectional differentiation, overt coding); and ergative/accusative case as opposed to nominative/absolutive case has lower text frequency and overt coding at least (I don’t know about inflectional differentiation in that case).

The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness by Mary Bucholtz