Discuss Question - AllPreviousYears

Read the following passage and answer questions (From 31 to 40). Readers of adventure stories such 'Treasure Island' or 'Sherlock Holmes' might remember how the seemingly harmless " black spot," a mere scrap of paper, or an envelope of just five orange pips, were a palpable source of fear for those who knew the code of the secret society who used them. Being singled out or " marked for death" in this way, rather than an obscure joke, was nothing less than a threat for those who understood the symbol. Language can encode many more nuances than just literal meanings or grammatical functions even when it comes to humble punctuation, secret languages of the register of a particular subculture. Interestingly, even in ordinary, everyday language use, the very words and expressions we use are already marked for our cultural and social biases, so much so that we're often not even aware of it. It reveals our underlying assumptions about what we may consider normal, default, regular--even positive or desirable in certain contexts. This has an impact on how we view their opposites--the abnormal, unusual, irregular, negative undesirable. Take a pair of simple antonyms such as happy/unhappy. The word "happy" is considered more of a default, normal, perhaps more desirable state in English, while "unhappy" is considered more " marked," and we know this because it's actively morphologically marked with a prefix - un. This idea, known as markedness, is a concept that is applied from linguistics to psychology, cognitive science and sociology; the concept is particularly useful for describing certain contrasts and constructs. To put it very simply, the insight into markedness is this: in a contrasting pair, you might expect an equal binary relationship, but you'll often find that the relationship is not equal, it's asymmetric. One is usually considered generic ( the unmarked) and in many cases, is a default state favored above the other (the marked) Unmarked words in English are often favored as more positive, such as in happy/sad, friendly/unfriendly, clean/unclean or dirty, even when there may be no overt morphological marking. Researchers have noted how pairs like man/woman, while considered politically or socially equal, linguistically are unequal, not just because " woman" is marked, but because " man" can still be understood as a generic for the human race while " woman" is never used in that way. It's revealing how we mark these words in common expressions that are not even politically charged at all, like "she' s four feet tall":! Which one of the following options provide an accurate interpretation of the following statement? Readers of adventure stories such 'Treasure Island' or 'Sherlock Holmes' might remember how the seemingly harmless " black spot," a mere scrap of paper, or an envelope of just five orange pips were a palpable source of fear for those who knew the code of the secret society who used them.

Click below to open Discussion & Feedback