MARKEDNESS AND THE PROJECTION PROBLEM

Rutherford (1982) explores linguistic and psycholinguistic constructs of markedness relative to a number of goals he proposes for theory construction in L2 acquisition research. This paper argues that if we formulate the theoretical goals so as to provide an accounting of language learnability, a different markedness construct is indicated: a projection model of markedness. The theoretical considerations entering into such a model are delineated and the model is tested on L2 acquisition data. While the model is found to be in need, of refinement, its predictive capacity and theoretical fit with language typological findings (Hawkins 1979) argue favourably for its viability.