69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
the ‘secondary’ term which is represented as ‘marginal’ and external
is in fact constitutive of the ‘primary’ term and essential to it (Derrida
1967a). The unmarked term is defined by what it seeks to suppress.
In the pairing of oppositions or contraries, Term B is defined
relationally rather than substantively. The linguistic marking of signifiers
in many of these pairings is referred to as ‘privative’ – consisting
of suffixes or prefixes signifying lack or absence – e.g. non-, un- or
-less. In such cases, Term B is defined by negation – being everything
that Term A is not. For example, when we refer to ‘non-verbal
communication’, the very label defines such a mode of communication
only in negative relation to ‘verbal communication’. Indeed,
the unmarked term is not merely neutral but implicitly positive in
contrast to the negative connotations of the marked term. The association
of the marked term with absence and lack is of course
problematized by those who have noted the irony that the dependence
of Term A on Term B can be seen as reflecting a lack on the
part of the unmarked term (Fuss 1991, 3).
The unmarked form is typically dominant (e.g. statistically
within a text or corpus) and therefore seems to be neutral, normal and
natural. It is thus transparent – drawing no attention to its invisibly
privileged status, while the deviance of the marked form is salient.
Where it is not simply subsumed, the marked form is foregrounded
– presented as ‘different’; it is ‘out of the ordinary’ – an extraordinary
deviational ‘special case’ which is something other than the
standard or default form of the unmarked term. Unmarked–marked
may thus be read as norm–deviation. It is notable that empirical
studies have demonstrated that cognitive processing is more difficult
with marked terms than with unmarked terms (Clark and Clark 1977).
Marked forms take longer to recognize and process and more errors
are made with these forms.
On the limited evidence from frequency counts of explicit
verbal pairings in written text (online texts retrieved using the former
Infoseek search engine, September 2000), while it was very common
for one term in such pairings to be marked, in some instances there
is not a clearly marked term (see Figure 3.3). For instance, in general
usage there seemed to be no inbuilt preference for one term in a
pairing such as old–young (one was just as likely to encounter