Zero-marking language

A zero-marking language is one where there tend to be no grammatical marks on either the dependents or modifiers or the heads or nuclei showing the relationship between different constituents of a phrase.

Pervasive zero marking is very rare, but instances of zero marking in various forms do occur in quite a number of languages. In many East and Southeast Asian languages, such as Thai and Vietnamese, the head verb and its dependents are not marked for any arguments or for the nouns' roles in the sentence.

Some languages use a similar process, called "juxtaposition" in linguistic jargon, to indicate possessive relationships. The rarity of pervasive zero marking is due to the fact that languages with juxtaposition have very much higher levels of inflection than languages with zero marking in noun phrases, so that the two almost never overlap.

Zero-marking, where it does occur, tends to show a strong relationship with word order. Languages where zero-marking is widespread are almost all Subject Verb Object. This is perhaps because verb-medial order allows two or more nouns to be recognised as such much more easily than either Subject Object Verb or Verb Subject Object order where two nouns might be adjacent and therefore their role in a sentence possibly confused. It is known indeed that languages will change from verb final to verb-medial order on removing marking from nouns. [ [http://email.eva.mpg.de/rara2006/abstracts_webpage/SINNEMAKI.pdf Languages with SOV word order and no morphological marking of core arguments] , by Kaius Sinnemäki (pdf).]

Notes

See also

* Dependent-marking language
* Double-marking language
* Head-marking language

References

* Maddieson, Ian. "Locus of Marking: Whole-Language Typology", in Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.) "The World Atlas of Language Structures", pp. 106–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1.