Glossary: morphology and phonology

In aspect systems, the aspect that expresses that an event is repeated regularly.

See mid.

See mid.

A form that occurs only once in a corpus (plural: hapax legomena). Comes from the Greek for ‘said once’.

Process by which a segment or a sequence of segments is deleted if it immediately precedes or follows the same segment or sequence of segments.

The bony structure that forms the roof of the front part of the mouth.

See fortition.

A multiple of the fundamental frequency; also called overtone.

A word in a syntactic construction or a morpheme in a morphological one that determines the grammatical function or meaning of the construction as a whole. For example, house is the head of the noun phrase the red house, and read is the head of the word unreadable.

Syllables which consist of more than one mora. In stress theory, heavy syllables contain either a long vowel (as the first syllable in bacon) or a short vowel followed by a tautosyllabic consonant (as the first syllable in bunker). Heavy syllables attract stress (cf. light syllables, mora).