Phonology and morphology glossary
Terms that have specialised meaning in phonology and/or morphology.
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NasalA sound produced with air flowing through the nasal passages. An example of a nasal consonant is [m] and an example of a nasal vowel is [ã]. | |
Nasal cavityThe large cavity above the roof of the mouth, connected to the upper part of the pharynx at the rear and having the nostrils at the front. | |
Nasal vowelA vowel sound produced without velic closure so that air escapes simultaneously though the oral and the nasal cavity. Also nasalised vowel. | |
Nasalized vowelSee nasal vowel. | |
Natural classA set of speech sounds that behaves similarly, for instance in a historical sound change or synchronic process (e.g. all obstruents, all voiceless stops, all front vowels, etc.). | |
NeologismA new lexeme that is attested, but had not previously been observed in the language. | |
NeurolinguisticsThe study of how language is represented and processed in the brain. | |
NeuterIn gender systems, one of the genders (cf. feminine, masculine). | |
NominativeIn languages with grammatical case, the one typically used for subjects. | |
Non-concatenativeA morphological operation that cannot be straightforwardly described as stringing together of two morphemes. | |
Non-pulmonicOf airstream mechanisms: not involving air from the lungs. The two non-pulmonic airstream mechanisms used for speech are glottalic and velaric. | |
Non-wordSee nonsense word. | |
Nonce formA word that appears only once in a given corpus or that was created on the fly and used only once. | |
Nonsense wordA word that could have been a word in a particular language (i.e. which observes the language's phonotactics), but happens not to be. E.g. plim in English. | |
NounA word that can function as the syntactic head of a noun phrase (NP). For example, book is the head of the noun phrase this excellent book about Mars. In many languages, nouns inflect for number, gender, and case. | |
Noun classSee gender. | |
Noun incorporationNoun + verb compounding in which the verb is the head; found especially in polysynthetic languages. | |
Nucleus(=peak). The vowel or diphthong in a syllable, which, usually, is the only obligatory part of the syllable. E.g. in the syllable /pak/, the vowel /a/ forms the nucleus. | |
NumberThe morphological categories that express contrasts involving countable quantity, which may be singular if the category is associated with nouns with a single referent; dual if associated with two referents; trial if associated with three referents; paucal if associated with a small number of referents; or plural if associated with more than one referent. Languages vary in which of these categories they encode. | |