On the Semantic Markedness of Phi-Features

Abstract When linguists talk about features, they usually talk about markedness as well. One reason is that feature systems are more efficient if there is an unmarked default value contrasted with a marked value. Nevertheless it is often difficult to determine which feature value should be regarded as the unmarked one; φ-features are a particularly interesting case since they are important in many different domains of linguistic inquiry, and therefore markedness considerations arise in several different ways. The main goal of this paper is to establish the concept of semantic markedness and its independence from morphological markedness.