What is marked?
What is marked?
- Linguistics Of or relating to that member of a pair of words or forms that explicitly denotes a particular subset of the meanings denoted by the other member of the pair. For example, of the two words lion and lioness, lion is unmarked for gender (it can denote either a male or female) whereas lioness is marked, since it denotes only females.
- Linguistics Explicitly characterized by or having a particular linguistic feature. For example, girls is marked for plural in English, whereas sheep is not.