Markings, everywhere and continuous

What gets marked in a language?  That's a question people ask (most of the time subconsciously) when they learn a new language or analyze the one they natively speak.  How people know when a noun is the recipient of the action of the verb, in English, is a matter of word order, the noun follows a verb.  But in Spanish it requires the word a after a verb and before the noun it marks if the noun is a human or includes a human.  Neither word order nor marking with additional words applies to ancient Latin and Greek, however.  They marked receiving an action with a case ending on the noun.

Nouns that receive the action or that are the result of the action are marked a number of different ways in the languages of the world.  And other parts of speech and functions of words get marked as well.  It's just the efficient way the brain has been set up to recognize functions and aspects in a language.

The brain is efficient in marking our experiences in life as well so that we can categorize them according to their function and aspect.  The events that happen to us are forgotten by default because there are so many of them.  So, we have to make markers for the event to stick for one reason or another.  Events that are pleasant are marked because we want to repeat them.  Events that are painful are remembered because of their dire effects on us.  There are other ways to mark events as well for our long term memories.

This Phillip Phillips song is a perfect non-scientific, very artful way of saying the same thing as the words above.  I have many markings in my experiences as I do in the languages I know.  And I will continue to have those markings.  I'm not done... so, I extend this song.