School of Critical Studies

The question of whether principles of universal markedness play an active role in the synchronic grammars is a long-standing and unresolved issue in phonology.  In this talk, I present work in progress that uses a novel source of data to address this question: the names given to non-Terrestrial characters in science fiction. 

Does the sense of phonotactic "oddity" associated with these characters' names represent departures from native-language lexical statistics, or is there evidence that markedness principles have a role to play? 

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First published: 6 March 2019