A Study Of The Context Construction Of Marked Language

Markedness Theory is an important theory of Structural linguistics; it was first proposed in early1930s by the Prague school. The study of Markedness Theory has become a hot topic since phonemicist Nikolay Trubetzkoy proposed the concept-’markedness’. In nearly80years after Markedness Theory was proposed, new connotations and concepts were given through continuous inheritance of the scholars in many fields of linguistics. Among them, American linguist Givon was the most innovative. He has done complete study on markedness at pragmatic level. In his opinion, at pragmatic level, markedness change dynamically; the existence of markedness depends on specific context. The same structure may be marked in one context, but unmarked in another. On the basis of his point, this paper discusses the markedness in context of situation from the situational perspective.This paper uses description method and contrastive analysis approach to analyze the markedness in context of situation, and gives a detailed analysis on the transfer of markedness from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In addition, it attempts to construct the context of situation by using markedness in objective and subjective aspects, and illustrate the positive effects of markedness on the construction of context of situation.