Backgrounding?

From: HÃ¥kan Lindgren
Message: 5106
Date: 2000-12-17

Could anyone explain the terms "backgrounding" and "markedness"? I'm reading a paper on pronouns by Richard A. Rhodes ("On Pronominal Systems", in "Indo-European, Nostratic and Beyond: Festschrift for Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin", Washington 1997) where he uses these terms. The paper is interesting, his point is that there are structures that make pronouns look similar in widely separated languages even though these languages are not related, and I would like to learn more about this, but I'm not able to figure out what these terms mean.
 
Some examples -
 
"In order to pronounce forms in the background ease of articulation is at a relatively high premium. The notion of ease of articulation is congruent to then notion of markedness. Thus a constraint to produce forms that are prototypically backgrounded will favor the occurrence of lesser marked segments.From this follows directly the widely observed property of pronominals (and function words in general) that they only very rarely contain highly marked segments and that they mostly contain relatively unmarked segments."
 
"Less marked segments [are] playing a disproportionate role in pronominal affix formation" - what does this mean?
 
"One important consequence of the facts presented in this paper should be to raise a caveat regarding the use of pronouns and pronominal affixes in long-range comparison. This paper calls into question the assumption that parallels in personal pronouns must be due to genetic inheritance if borrowing and chance resemblance are ruled out. We must also consider the pragmatic effect of backgrounding as suggested here."
 
Thanks in advance,
Hakan