1165: Zero-Markers Feb 16, 2018

There are affixes that indicate grammatical function without carrying meaning themselves necessarily, such as '-tion' which makes verbs into nouns, or '-S' which pluralized or indicated the 3rd person singular tense for verbs. There are also free words that have a similar role, such as 'will' indicating future time (not future tense, technically). While some of those were affixes and some are words, all of those are considered 'markers', and markers can show many different things. There are, as shown before, tense markers for instance, but just like how there are "zero-determiners" which do not exist in speech or writing but whose apparent absence still means something, the lack of a '-ed' or '-s' on a verb does not mean that it lacks tense, and indeed people know only because of the lack of an apparent marker that 'I walk' is not in the past tense. These zero-markers of course still mark things, but less intuitively. Some languages like English, or moreover Chinese will use zero-markers more than languages like Latin or Finnish where meaning is comparatively more dependent on affixes.
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