Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell 8 (4) A fourth and final distinction concerns prominence and mark- edness and the use of conjunctions. The notion of markedness, derived originally from phonology, has been applied to a wider range of linguis- tic phenomena. Various criteria are typically examined to determine whether a given linguistic form is marked. These include distribution, morphology, semantics, and contextual implication. Black looks at fre- quency distributions and what she calls “congruence between marked forms and marked contexts and between unmarked forms and unmarked contexts”18. Once she finds this correlation between distribution and con- text, she formulates her view of prominence in terms of “prominence is markedness that is motivated”19. We wish to extend the notion further by noting that there is also a cline of markedness along which the conjunc- tions function. A variety of markedness indicators determine the place of a conjunction along the cline. Frequency of distribution is one major cri- terion for formulation of the cline, but other factors include morphology (e.g. compound conjunctions, that is, made up of two or more conjunc- tions, are more heavily marked than simplex forms), semantics (this is especially the case with logical-semantic conjunctions noted below) and context of use (more heavily marked conjunctions appear in more heavily marked contexts, as determined by other markedness criteria). The cline of markedness regarding conjunctions shows their relative significance to each other and in terms of more or less markedness. 3. The Greek Conjunction System The Greek conjunction system is more complex than has usually been determined. We contend that there are three axes along which the conjunctions function. One of these is vertical, and the other two are horizontal. Selection of a given conjunction requires that one of the two horizontal axes be chosen, and that a level on the vertical axis be chosen. The vertical axis is a cline of discourse levels, while the horizontal axes represent two different clines, one of continuity–discontinuity and the other of logical-semantic relations. a. Vertical Axis of Levels of Discourse The vertical axis of levels of discourse indicates that conjunctions function at different levels of discourse. The levels of discourse move from Black, Sentence Conjunctions, 67. 18 Black, Sentence Conjunctions, 70, in contrast to Halliday’s “foregrounding is promi- 19 nence that is motivated” (Explorations in the Functions of Language [London 1973] 112).