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