The concept of markedness was first developed in the Prague School of linguistic theory. The notion of marked and unmarked values of a category was first developed for phonological systems by Trubetzkoy (1931; 1939/1969) and first applied to morphosyntactic categories and semantics by Jakobson (1932/1984; 1939/1984; see Greenberg 1966b:11). Markedness has since been adopted by both the generative and the typological approaches to linguistic theory, not surprisingly in rather different ways. As a consequence, markedness in generative grammar is considerably different from markedness in typology (compare Battistella 1996). In fact, in adapting the concept of markedness to cross-linguistic universals, Greenberg (1966b) introduces significant theoretical innovations to markedness (Croft 1996). For this reason, we will use the rather cumbersome locution typological markedness in this book.

Like implicational universals, typological markedness is a fundamental concept underlying much contemporary work in typology, even though it is not overtly referred to very often. Much current typological work is supported by typological markedness (see chapters 5–7). Also, the phenomena described as typological markedness represent an important manifestation of the interplay between two major competing motivations, economy and iconicity, in linguistic expressions. Finally, typological markedness plays a significant role in an influential model of morphological representation, that of Bybee and her associates, which in turn is closely associated with recent developments in syntactic representation, particularly construction grammar (see, for example, Bybee and Thompson 1997; Croft 2001).