Antonymous Adjectives Markedly Used

Abstract

The concept of “markedness in the work of Prague school linguists refers to relationships between two complementary or antonymous terms which can be distinguished by the presence of a feature (+a versus -a). Such a position can occur at various linguistic levels. Markedness contrasts for example, can arise at the morphological level, when one of the two words is derived from the other and therefore contains an explicit formal marker such as a prefix (profitable - unprofitable). Markedness contrasts also appear at the semantic level in many pairs of gradable antonymous adjectives, especially scalar ones.