In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. In the Latin word amo, "I love", for instance, the suffix -o marks indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Latin is a highly fusional language.
A lexeme is called marked if it contains a marker, and unmarked if not. In nominative-accusative languages, the nominative case is typically unmarked.
Modern linguists concern themselves with many different facets of language, from the physical properties of the sound waves in utterances to the intentions of speakers towards others in conversations and the social contexts in which conversations are embedded.
And linguists are increasingly called on in legal proceedings that turn on questions of precise interpretation, a development that has given rise to a new field of study of language and law.
Probably the oldest forms of applied linguistics are the preparation of dictionaries and the field of interpretation and translation, all of which have been greatly influenced by the advent of the computer.
The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the "corpus" the phonemes, the morphemes, and so on.
Structural linguistics, with its insistence on objective methods of verification and precisely specified techniques of discovery, with its refusal to allow any talk of meanings or mental entities or unobservable features, derives from the "behavioral sciences" approach to the study of man, and is also largely a consequence of the philosophical assumptions of logical positivism.
Instead of the appropriate subject matter of linguistics being a randomly or arbitrarily selected set of sentences, the proper object of study was the speaker's underlying knowledge of the language, his "linguistic competence" that enables him to produce and understand sentences he has never heard before.
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