Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology

Markedness is a pervasive notion in theories of language. In some phonological theories or models, it very much occupies a prominent position. In this chapter it is argued that the notion of markedness is not useful to our understanding of phonology and language in general, for two reasons. The first is that the notion of markedness has convincingly been shown in the literature to be a confusing label for a variety of things, all of which can be explained independently. The second is that if pho