Markedness Theories

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Emotions in Language, language: English, abstract: The term markedness has been used for various concepts in linguistics for a long time in spite of its controversial usage. The discourse on emotions or emotional language from a linguistic point of view has also been controversial and, as opposed to markedness theories, has not had a long tradition. When conducting research for this topic I noticed that there is little material that links markedness theory to emotional language. This paper is an attempt to link the two concepts and to show that markedness is an indicator for the intensity of emotions.