Markedness

This will be brief, because the idea is simple. The purpose of this writing is to make adjectives more meaningful. I will be doing this by discussing the concept of markedness and by attempting to show the applications of it.

You're at a meeting. Eight people are dressed in suits. One person is dressed in a hotdog outfit. The person in the hotdog outfit is the marked person. Why? Because they are the person that stands out. Another way we can state this is they are the person that makes us think about something special. Now, check out the following statement:

You are my favourite reader!

So, which word stands out? That's the marked one. Check out this next sentence:

You are my favourite reader!

The same word is the marked one, but it doesn't stand out as much. That is, it's not as marked. What we can tell about this information is that something is not only marked or unmarked, but rather something is placed along a spectrum of markedness. We can relate that to almost all adjectives. One is smart or not smart, but rather they are somewhere along the spectrum.

Markedness: The quality of an object that determines how much that object innately provokes thought.

What are the requirements for something to have markedness? Well, we can easily deduce that all objects have some level of markedness, so the real questions is: What makes something more marked than something else? There are a few conditions making something especially marked:

(1) It is out of context.
(2) It is a large part of the context.
(3) Attention is purposefully directed toward it.

Gotta fly.