Glossary: morphology and phonology

A morphological process that repeats all or part of a given base.

A construction in which agent and patient are coreferential.

In tone languages, a set of tones that are relatively high (high register) or relatively low (low register).

A lexical tone with a level pitch contour. Contrast contour tone.

A burst of noise produced when a stop consonant is released.

An instance of allomorphy that occurs in very few words and is not productive. Typically, relic alternations were productive at an earlier stage of the language, but subsequently levelled in all but a few (high frequency) words. E.g. the alternation between [ f ] and [ p ] in the English words father and paternal.

The frequency at which an acoustic system (including the vocal tract) vibrates when excited by input energy.

A verb form that highlights the result of the event (rather than the cause or the process of becoming).

Produced slightly further back in the vocal tract. For instance, the first consonant in the English word trip is a retracted alveolar (produced at the back of the alveolar ridge) because of the following [r] sound. Cf. advanced.

Consonant articulation involving the curled-up tip of the tongue and the back of the alveolar ridge or palate. Some speakers of English have retroflex approximants in rye and err. Retroflex stops occur in Hindi and other languages spoken in India.