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Inlinguistics, amarker is a free or boundmorpheme that indicates thegrammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur asclitics orinflectionalaffixes. Inanalytic languages andagglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. Infusional languages andpolysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the wordamō ("I love") is marked by suffix-ō for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Analytic languages tend to have a relatively limited number of markers.
Markers should be distinguished from the linguistic concept ofmarkedness. Anunmarked form is the basic "neutral" form of a word, typically used as its dictionarylemma, such as—in English—for nouns the singular (e.g.cat versuscats), and for verbs the infinitive (e.g.to eat versuseats,ate andeaten). Unmarked forms (e.g. thenominative case in many languages) tend to be less likely to have markers, but this is not true for all languages (compareLatin). Conversely, a marked form may happen to have azero affix, like thegenitive plural of some nouns inRussian (e.g.сапо́г). In some languages, the same forms of a marker have multiple functions, such as when used in differentcases ordeclensions (for example-īs in Latin).
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