Study On Relationship Between Linguistic Markedness And Cognitive Prominence In English Language

There are many relationships between linguistic symbols in language system, including similarity, comparison, opposition, etc. In two elements which are opposite to each other, one is more specific, concrete, complicated and with low-frequency, the other is more common, general, simple and with high-frequency. This phenomenon is called"markedness"in linguistics. Markedness Theory is a linguistic theory which describes and analyzes the asymmetry phenomenon of linguistic elements with the main features of"marked term"and"unmarked term"."Marked"and"Unmarked"are the two basic concepts of Markedness Theory. Markedness Theory is firstly put forward by Prague School linguist-Trubetzkoy in 1930s. The essential meaning is: In language, unmarked term is more basic, more natural, more frequently used, more routine, more normative, more expectant and simpler to people than marked term. Nowadays, this theory has been applied widely into many different research areas, including phonology, grammatics, semantics, pragmatics, typological linguistics, semiotics, second language acquisition, etc. Markedness phenomenon is universal, it exists in all the levels of language: phoneme (the opposition of [p] and [b]), vocabulary (the opposition of dog and bitch, book and books), grammar (the opposition of I dislike such books and Such books I dislike), etc. Due to the limitation of the length of dissertation, the paper only studies markedness phenomenon at the level of lexis.The notion of"prominence"belongs to cognitive linguistics, it is the things which can be recognized, processed and memorized easily. In a category, if one word is used frequently and is placed prominently, we say that this word has the feature of cognitive prominence. In our daily life, the pronoun"he"is used more frequently than the pronoun"she". According to Cognitive Prominence Theory, the pronoun"he"is more prominent than the pronoun"she". The pronoun"she"has linguistic markedness, while the pronoun"he"is unmarked. The main factors which cause the phenomenon of linguistic markedness are cognitive perceptible elements and traditional socio-cultural elements.Through the analysis at the level of English lexis of English language from the perspective of cognitive prominence, a conclusion is reached finally: Linguistic markedness has a close relationship with cognitive prominence. In English, if one word has stronger cognitive prominence, it will not be marked; if one word has weaker cognitive prominence, it will be marked. Linguistic markedness is the realization of cognitive prominence in English. Meanwhile, the author further studies linguistic markedness through sexist language in English and points out the reasons which cause language discrimination. Finally, the dissertation traces the internal and external causes of such phenomenon-cognitive perceptible elements and socio-cultural elements. These attempts are expected to promote language development and to benefit cultural exchanges between different countries.