Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell 16 feature. Although this model is still utilized by some linguists 59, it has proved ineffective in a number of ways: it depends upon successful exten- sion of phonological features to other, more abstract notions, such as case and aspect; it is not necessarily true that every opposition can be de- scribed in terms of the presence and absence of a given feature the way this can be used in phonology, but there may be degrees of its appearance; this model is based on a hierarchy of linguistic structures that proceed from simple to complex, neglecting many of the interconnected and context- dependent features of language; and it neglects other factors such as how the linguistic item is distributed in the language. Thus, most linguists, and we follow this line of reasoning, build upon the Prague concept of markedness and use what has been called a «cross-linguistic distributional analysis» first pioneered by Greenberg 60, and developed further by many others since then 61. This form of markedness does not require a single feature notation, but is able to take into account a cline of combined fac- tors, including morphology, semantics, and, most importantly here, dis- tribution. Distribution might at first seem to be inappropriate as a means of determining markedness, since it does not appear at first related to either morphology or semantics, but what might be seen as simply ran- domness. However, Givón has developed the concept in terms of what he calls iconicity. He believes that substantive grounds, such as varying con- textual, socio-cultural, cognitive and communicative factors, determine the distribution of a given linguistic item, such that «The marked cate- gory (figure) tends to be less frequent, thus cognitively more salient, than the corresponding unmarked one (ground)» 62. Thus, one is justified in 59 See, for example, E. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); E. Andrews, Markedness Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 9-43, 136-39; Martín-Asensio, «Foregrounding and its Relevance», esp. pp. 209-10. 60 J.H. Greenberg, Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. 61 See, for example, B. Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems (CTL; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 111- 22; A.M. Zwicky, «On Markedness in Morphology», Die Sprache 24 (1978), pp. 129- 43; C. Bache, Verbal Aspect: A General Theory and its Application to Present-Day English (Odense: Odense University Press, 1985), pp. 60-73, where he shows that Jakobson pro- vides a half-way point in the discussion, as well as having difficulty in defining verbal aspect; T. Givón, «Markedness in Grammar: Distributional, Communicative and Cognitive Correlates of Syntactic Structure», Studies in Language 15 (1991), pp. 335-70; idem, Functionalism and Grammar (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1995), esp. pp. 25-69. 62 Givón, «Markedness in Grammar», p. 337; cf. idem, Functionalism and Grammar, p. 28. On figure and ground, see S. Wallace, «Figure and Ground: The Interrelationships of Linguistic Categories», in P.J. Hopper (ed.), Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982), pp. 201-23; P.J. Hopper, «Aspect and Foregrounding in Discourse», in T. Givón (ed.), Syntax and Semantics. XII. Discourse and Syntax (New York: Academic, 1979), pp. 213-41; assessed and modified in Porter, Verbal Aspect, pp. 92-93.