Glossary: morphology and phonology

A non-hazardous technique for producing images of the interior of the body. The technique involves applying a very strong magnetic field to the body, followed by a radio-frequency pulse specific to hydrogen.

The set of features [sonorant], [syllabic], [consonantal], or their equivalents.

The way in which the articulators interfere with and direct the airstream for the purposes of producing speech sounds. That is, the properties of a consonant other than its place of articulation and laryngeal properties.

Markedness constraints (in Optimality Theory) express "unfavoured" segments or syllable structures, e.g. nasalized vowels as opposed to oral vowels, front rounded vowels as opposed to front unrounded vowels, coda consonants (as opposed to open syllables), complex onsets, etc. If a language has the marked object (e.g. nasalized vowels) the language also has the unmarked object (i.e. oral vowels), while the reverse does not hold. Markedness is also relevant in morphology, e.g. passive voice is marked compared to the active voice; plural is marked compared to singular, etc.

In gender systems, one of the genders (cf. feminine, neuter).

A noun that refers to a group of objects as a collective entity, rather than as a group of individual member entities, e.g. English information, furniture (cf. count noun).

A perceptual effect demonstrating that visual cues influence speech perception. A video of a speaker's face is overdubbed with the soundtrack of an utterance that is different from the one the viewer is seeing. The visual and auditory cues may be integrated by the hearer and the resulting perception can differ from both of the speaker's utterances.

Of a fricative or approximant sound: articulated in such a way that the air escapes down the midline of the vocal tract.

A phonological rule that switches around two contiguous sounds.

Vowel sounds such as [e, o] produced with the tongue around the midpoint on the vertical axis. Sometimes languages have two mid vowels, like [e] and [ε]. In such a case the former vowel is referred to as upper-mid (or 'half-close' or 'close-mid') and the latter vowel is referred to as lower-mid (or 'half-open' or 'open-mid'). See also high, low, front, central, back.