On silent markedness
Edoardo Cavirani, Marc Van Oostendorp
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003337
April 2017
Empty categories – positions in phonological representations that have no direct phonetic counterpart – are still controversial in phonology. In this paper we give the main arguments for still assuming such positions and furthermore establish a markedness category for empty positions: some of them are stronger than others, and we can derive this from a combination of Element Theory and Turbidity Theory. We illustrate this with Italian and Dutch dialects, and point out that the phonological hierarchy of empty positions may correspond to a hierarchy of syntactic positions.