Phonological Markedness: Evidence From Chinese

Markedness Theory is central to contemporary linguistic typology. It holds that thereare systematic asymmetries between values on the same grammatical parameter, thatis, one value is less or more marked than another. Criteria of markedness includeimplicational universal, behavioral potential and frequency of use.Examining the phoneme inventory of Chinese and a sizable corpus of spokenChinese through the lens of Markedness Theory, the current research investigatesChinese phonology in view of both language structure and language use. It presentsstructural and empirical evidence in support of marked values of distinctive featuresproposed in previous literature based solely on crosslinguistic comparison ofphoneme inventories. It also lends support to the argument of usage-based modelthat language structure is related to language use. Hinging on a systematic analysisof token frequency distribution of Chinese phonemes in the corpus, this studyproposes more fine-grained markedness hierarchies of distinctive feature values thanhave been suggested in broad strokes.