marquants

Marquants are linguistic markers that encode grammatical or discourse information on a word or phrase. The term, derived from the French marquant meaning marking, appears in some linguistic literature to refer to markers or morphemes that signal features such as number, case, tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, or definiteness. Marquants can take the form of affixes, clitics, particles, or even word order changes.

In usage, marquants can be obligatory or optional within a language and may attach to nouns, verbs, adjectives, or phrases depending on the language’s morphology. The position of a marquant relative to its host can be suffixal, prefixal, infixed, or separate as a particle, and the same feature may be encoded by more than one marquant across languages. For instance, Turkish uses suffixes such as -lar/-ler to indicate plural; English uses -s to mark third-person singular on verbs and -ed for past tense; Mandarin Chinese uses le as a perfective marker; Japanese employs topic or focus particles as functional marquants in discourse.

In linguistic scholarship, marquants are closely related to grammatical morphemes and markers, and the term is often interchangeable with terms such as grammatical marker or morphological marker in descriptive work. Because marquant is not universally adopted in English-language publications, many authors prefer more widely used terms.

See also: grammatical marker, morphology, affix, clitic, particle.