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Abstract: This article considers to what extent sample based typological research may shed light on questions of central concern within the minimalist program of generative grammar. Focusing on the nature of the structure building operation assumed within the minimalist program (Merge), it is argued that typological data may be relevant to the question whether the product of Merge, a pair of sisters, is symmetric or asymmetric. To this end, a case study is presented showing a fundamental and universal asymmetry between the members of a binary noun phrase coordination, such that the relation between the two conjuncts is invariably marked on the second conjunct. Assuming coordination to present the product of ‘pure Merge’ (i.e. undisturbed by further movement operations or rearrangements of any other kind), the result suggests that Merge creates an asymmetric sister pair, in which linear order and morphological dependency marking are consistently patterned. The article argues that this is generally the case in contexts of ‘restricted syntax’, which might equally well be studied using large typological samples. The article furthermore argues that the asymmetry between members of sister pairs involves both phonological and semantic dependence, suggesting that the asymmetry originates within the central syntactic component of grammar. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms 'marked' and 'unmarked' have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term 'markedness' is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of 'markedness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]