When a form is more complex or more marked, the meaning will be more complex consequently. A sentence could be said to be marked if it does not follow the conventional or unmarked word order pattern of a language. Changing word order is done by the syntactic processes which make a sentence marked. The typical function of an unmarked sentence is to show focus on some elements. Markedness can be represented as binary or as a cline which begins with unmarked, and it ends in the most marked one. For markedness, what is mainly considered is that complex or marked form has more morphemes than the unmarked form. Moreover, the occurrence frequency of the unmarked form is much higher than its marked counterpart. Therefore there is a direct relation between the markedness of a form and its semantic variety and complexity. Different syntactic processes in a language can change an unmarked sentence to a marked one mostly to represent more focus on one of the elements of the sentence. Among others also we find that serial verb construction(SVC) is an unmarked sentence. Serial verb construction or verb serialization is defined as a string of verbs or verb phrases that are not separated by a connector and the verbs in this construction share the same grammatical information and sometimes the same arguments, and finally this construction describes a single event. This paper will analyze some samples of the unmarked sentences of the standard modern Persian which are the result of the syntactic processes and, it could be seen in topicalized, clefting, scrambled and SVC sentences among others. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the standard word order change of Persian sentences which are the result of the syntactic processes is related to the concept of markedness. A different type of markedness will be introduced in this paper. In Persian we mostly find this new recognized type of markedness which is movement markedness. Beside movement markedness, the formal markedness is also seen in the syntactic structures of Persian among others. Movement markedness is found in syntactic structures and specifically word order because movement is a key issue in syntax. The function of this markedness is to focus the moved element. Markedness is not a process but it is an abstract phenomenon which is revealed by syntactic movements but it is not a process by itself. When a syntactic process like passivization works in a language, the state of sentence changes from unmarked to marked. This formal markedness beside the distributional markedness are often at work when there is movement markedness in the structure. This paper will show that this type of markedness is very frequent in creating new syntactic structures. It is predictable that the movement markedness is a universal concept and it works in other languages too, since there is no language without syntax. The movement markedness shows how syntax with syntactic processes employs markedness to create diversity and different functions.

Markedness is one of the important issues in Universal Grammar. It is believed that marked verses / unmarked elements are acquired after the parameters were fixed in the frame work of Government and Binding theory. Markedness is of the factors differentiate languages. Because of this, it can be interesting for the translators, translation criticism as well as those who are interested in translation studies. Not observing markedness, the translators don't make ungrammatical structures. Because of this, the translators commit more mistakes.The study has investigated the amount of observed markedness in translating a particular structure in which Persian uses affirmative form but Arabic (the holy Quran] negative. It has been shown that up to %90 of the Persian translated form of the structures have been translated with no attention to the markedness structures of the items.The study has also shown that some unmarked structures have been paid more attention by the translators. It shows that markedness at least for some specific structures is not a matter of dichotomy.The study shows that in order to provide natural equivalence in translating the Holy Quran one needs to observe markedness particularly for those structures that seem different in SL and TL.

The purpose of the present article is to make a comparative study of theme markedness in Persian and English medical texts. It aims to determine the similarities and differences of Persian and English with regard to markedness. The study has been done based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and is concerned with the textual metafunction of this approach. To accomplish the purpose of the study, several books and articles were selected in the field of medical sciences. The corpus contained 1000 randomly chosen clauses of written texts, the data were gathered in both Persian and English and the research method was descriptive-analytic.The restults indicated that in Persian medical texts, circumstantial adjuncts in the subject position have a high frequency, representing that such an occurrence sounds unmarked to Persian native speakers and Persian has a different word order rather than English in medical texts. It does not completely conform to the concept of Halliday’s theory with regard to markedness. This research also illustrates that the properties of being prodrop and having non-fixed word order distinguish Persian from English regarding the notion of markedness. In addition to language differences, theme markedness is closely related to some factors such as authors’/writers’ style differences, writing form types, text-clause relationship, emphasis, contrast, and specific genre. Since, the above mentioned factors in Persian and English effect theme markedness, they are regarded as their similarities, while language structure refers to their differences.

Despite the belief of the orthodox schools of semiotics, which emphasize the fundamental difference between visual (iconic) and linguistic (symbolic) signs and do not consider visual pictures as channels for conveying implicit and linguistic meanings due to imitation or objective similarity with reality, investigating the ratio of linguistic and pictorial signs has been one of the important topics of semiotics studies for more than half a century. Some structuralist semioticians, such as Roman Jacobsen, Roland Barthes, Yuri Lutman and Umberto Eco have taken advantage of modeling the symbolic system of language and its communicative roles to study systems, texts, media and non-verbal signs such as photographs, due to the increasing importance of the issue of visual representation in contemporary culture, especially the abundant use of photographs in the web space and virtual social networks. This issue has been interpreted in the context of a great transformation, which William J.T. Mitchell refers to as "the pictorial turn". One of the concepts that have not been addressed in the semiotic equilibrium of language and picture is "semantic markedness" which allows us to examine the semantic components of a photograph, in "referring" to reality or "deviation" from it. The present essay, assuming the similarity of "semantic markedness" and "connotation" in photographic rhetorical researches and bringing evidence of this similarity, while rereading the theory of markedness in linguistic studies of literature, has used this theory for the first time in the study of Duane Michaels's narrative photographs. According to the results of this research, which was carried out by an analytical-comparative method, on the one hand, Michaels' photographs are based on "straight photography" devices, such as conventional perspective, wide depth of field, substitution of grays equivalent to the degree of familiar colors that we know from objects in nature, imitation natural vision by adopting eye-level point of view, and relatively classic compositions, which are used to pretend to be real and on the other hand, they escape from reality by adding some arrays, such as multiple exposures, slow shutter speed to induce movement, and creating blurred and ghost-like figures. He In the meantime, by adding some semantic components and by creating a distance between the signified and the referent, both in the axis of paradigmatic and in the axis of syntagmatic, makes the "unmarked" reality marked, and creates new connotations. Where the objectivity of the photographs does not reflect the similarity of the signified and the referent, Michaels resorts to a special type of markedness, i.e., "subjunctive markedness", which is imposed on the photographs from a cognitive system. This cognitive system and implicit meanings in Michaels' photographs originates from poetry, stories, legends, myths, Eastern mysticism, and of course religious and psychological beliefs, and allows his selections not to be based solely on formal and semantic similarities with reality.

In this article, markedness is studied through the errors of one Persian Motor Transcortical and two Broca aphasias in production of simple and compound nouns comprising of “ N+N” , “ Adj+N” and “ N+verb stem” with regard to optimality theory of Prince and Smolensky (1993). The issue that language structures include two marked and unmarked values is called markedness. It is believed that the unmarked phones and structures are acquired before marked ones in language acquisition (Ulatowska, & Baker 1975; Jakobson, 1941). The markedness studies also show contrast between these groups of phonemes: voiceless and voiced consonants; liquids and non-liquids; back and front consonants; affricates versus stops and fricatives and oral versus nasal vowels. Since compounding is one of the most productive and common processes in Persian, it is necessary to study markedness in confrontation naming and repetition tasks of verbal and nonverbal compound nouns on the basis of phonological theories such as optimality theory to get some pieces of fresh evidence in order to reveal whether markedness theory is true or false. Using the clinical data also gives us an opportunity to get a clear picture from phonological processes in speech production of Persian native speakers and add richness to former theories. The main purpose of this article is to study the markedness by using the description of the common error patterns to get the necessary evidence to evaluate the markednesss theory of Jakobson (1972). The study of aphasics’ data tries to clarify whether markedness is extended as a general principle to language behavior of aphasic patients and whether aphasic patients’ errors in confrontation naming and repetition tasks are in agreement with Jakobson (1972) or not. The comparison of Persian aphasic patients’ competence and performance is another purpose used to clarify what is the explanation of optimality theory of Prince and Smolensky (1993) regarding markedness theory in Persian. One female and two male monolingual Persian-speaking aphasic patients participated in this study. Three normal men and women as a control group were matched to aphasic patients according to gender, age, educational degree, native language and handedness. Language stimuli of this study included 32 simple and 32 root (nonverbal) and synthetic (verbal) compound nouns. These nouns were the most frequent categories among different categories derived from PhD dissertations of Khabbaz (2007) and Ghonchepour (2014). Regarding frequency and length of stimuli, an effort was made to match the simple words to the compound nouns. To investigate the ability of patients to produce simple and compound nouns, picture confrontation naming and repetition tasks were designed and performed. 32 pictures of compound stimuli were intermixed with 32 pictures of simple nouns. The speech of patients was recorded while doing the tasks. In the repetition task, the same lexical stimuli pertaining to confrontation naming task were used and the patients were asked to repeat them after the examiner. Their performance was recorded and then, errors were classified and analyzed based on phonological patterns of common disorders. Errors and phonological processes in confrontation naming and repetition of simple and compound nouns are analyzed on the basis of final consonant deletion, cluster reduction, fronting, stopping and onset voiced obstruent consonant patterns. Data analysis shows that the errors of these patients are phonemic and the insertion process is not observed in any of error patterns. The deletion and reduction processes take place in final clusters of word syllables while voicing process mostly happens in onset clusters of words. In other words, the *COMPLEX (coda), *CODA, MAX-IO and UNIFORMITY constraints of markedness and faithfulness show that the unmarked CV syllable structures are the most optimal output structures which are represented via the deletion of final consonant or the reduction of coda cluster obstruent consonants. The domination of ONSET (-voiced) obstruent over IDENT ONSET (voice) and IDENT-IO (voice) reveals that voiced obstruent consonants of onsets are the unmarked phonemes in comparison with voiceless ones. This issue is in agreement with Fromkin (1970), Lecours and Lhermitte (1969), green (1969) and Blumstein (1979) and is against Berlin, Lowe-Bell, Cullen, Thompson and Loovis (1973) and Jakobson (1972). Coronal phonemes in comparison with dorsal phonemes and stops against fricatives are unmarked which are respectively shown through *DORSAL and *FRICATIVE markedness constraints proving markedness theory of Jakobson (1972). The findings also show that the Persian Broca and Motor Transcortical aphasias mostly use onset voiced obstruent consonants in place of voiceless ones which is contrary to Jakobson (1972) and indicates that voiceless stops are more vulnerable than their voiced pairs. The findings also reveal that high vowels are the most unmarked ones among vowels and patients use them in place of mid or low vowels.

The current study was trying to study the semantics and structure of anthroponyms and the theoretical reflection of their cultural markedness in Russian translations. This paper presents an in-depth comparative analysis of the English and Russian anthroponyms and explores stylistic, grammatical, and lexical features of translating proper names. The study is illustrated with the examples from the novel of J. R. R. Tolkien "Hobbit, or There and Back again". The scientific novelty of the present work considers the ways of expressing culture in a language through English anthroponyms in Russian translations. According to the idea of anthropocentricity of the language stated in the article, the cultural markedness of the English anthroponyms in Russian translations is reflected by a man's idea about the world and national culture. Anthroponyms turn out to be real signs with meanings and are capable of causing different associations. Creating images that denote persons by their activities uses the figurative and semantic specificity of the language to the limit.

This paper aims to investigate markedness in nominal and pronominal morphology of modern north-western Iranian languages from a diachronic perspective based on Hawkinʼs (2004) minimized forms principle. Based on this principle marked forms ocuupy the lowest and unmarked forms the highest position in performance-based hierarchies. Forms are ranked based on their frecuency in performance-based hierarchies. The reason that there exist these different frecuensies can be attributed to communicative reasons, complixity and different occurances of linguistic units in outside world. In this paper, we have shown that markedness changes in number and gender hierarchies are in line with minimized forms principle and its predictions in the investigated languages, but there are some exceptions in case hierarchy, which is not in line minimized forms predictions.

Various kinds of Food not only have physiological and biological functions, but are integrated into our social and cultural systems. As part of our cultural semiotics system, food forms a continuum on which different marked and unmarked food elements are arranged. Like other semiotic systems, food items are influenced by cultural and social factors. In order to investigate the effect of the authors’ gender on the use of food elements, a number of 12 novels from contemporary male and female authors were selected and analyzed. In both gender groups, unmarked items were used more frequently than the marked items. However, the function of items used in each group was different. In the works of male novelists, the frequency of the unmarked food items was higher than the opposite group. However, female novelists used a wider variety and diverse types of unmarked foods. Regarding the marked category, both frequency and diversity of the marked elements were significantly higher in women's texts. The common marked features identified in the texts belonging to both groups were ‘happiness’, ‘belief’ and ‘empathy’, but there was no case for ‘wealth’ in the men's novels. The findings of this research indicate a significant relationship between gender and food function in the corpus of the study. The variety of food and the greater number of these items in the works of female writers are consistent with the preoccupations and concerns of Iranian women compared to men. The findings of the present research show an iconic relationship between the cultural and social tendencies of two gender groups and its representation in their works.