Middle Reclining: The Repositioning of Cultural Markedness
The most salient feature in the rapid development of semiotics in the last half century is its shaking off glottocentrism. The discipline, now taking the cultural signification activities as its main object, bears little resemblance to the branch of lingu
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Middle Reclining: The Repositioning of Cultural Markedness
The most salient feature in the rapid development of semiotics in the last half century is its shaking off glottocentrism. The discipline, now taking the cultural signification activities as its main object, bears little resemblance to the branch of linguistics that it looked like in the 1960s. Culture is the conglomeration of all relevant meaning activities in society. Since no human signification/interpretation can be free from ethical value judgment, a study of signs in culture must be semioethic, different from one in linguistics. To demonstrate the impact of this changing of models in semiotics, a good examples is the study of markedness, i.e., of the asymmetry in any binary opposition. The idea was originally raised in linguistics, and remained as such for almost 80 years. For instance, the asymmetry between a voiced consonant and its voiceless counterpart is universal in almost all languages. The voiced is always less used, due mainly, as argued by linguists, to the additional morphological feature of the vibration of the vocal chord. Markedness has occasionally been discussed in socio-linguistic studies, most of which concentrate on the asymmetry of cultural binaries, a most obvious example being the male-female opposition.1 Its discussion could naturally connected to the genders in lexicology.2 Not many of the studies of markedness in cultural studies escaped from the linguistic model. That could account for the fact that not much result has been produced, since linguists have not succeeded in finding general rules of markedness in languages. After eighty years of heated debate, many linguists acknowledge that markedness in language, though recognized as universal, is still hardly explainable by a consistent theory.3 After reexamining the various proposals 1 Linda
Waugh, “Marked and Unmarked: A Choice Between Unequals in Semiotic Structure”, Semiotica 38: 1982, pp. 299–318. 2 Ruth Elizabeth King, Talking Gender: A Guide to Nonsexist Communication, Toronto: Copp Clark Putna, 1991, p. 2, quoted in Marcel Danesi “Semiotics of Media and Culture”, Routledge Companion to Semiotics, 2009, p. 144. 3 David Lightfoot, How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 186. © Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd 2020 Y. Zhao, The River Fans Out, China Academic Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7724-6_5
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on markedness in linguistics, Edwin L. Battistella concludes that none of them is “either fully worked out or wholly consistent”.4 Martin Haspelmath goes so far as to propose straightforwardly to abandon the wild-goose chase: “The concepts that it denotes are not helpful”.5 Meaning-construction is a social right, which submits itself to metalingual rules that often appear as social consensus in the service of the interest of certain social groups but supposedly “acceptable and fair” to others. Most people adopt social
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