Chapter 5. On silent markedness

Empty categories – positions in phonological representations that have no direct phonetic counterpart – are (still) controversial in phonological theory. In this paper we give the main arguments for assuming such positions and we furthermore establish a markedness hierarchy for empty positions: some of them are stronger (‘more marked’) than others, and we can derive this from a combination of Element Theory and Turbidity Theory. We illustrate our point with Italian and Dutch dialects, and point out that the phonological hierarchy of empty positions may correspond to a hierarchy of syntactic positions.