Glossary: morphology and phonology

A verb with the semantic property of referring to a state of existence, rather than a physical action (e.g. be is a stative verb in English).

The part of a word to which inflections attach.

In psycholinguistics, a test item presented to a participant during the course of an experiment. Plural: stimuli.

A sound where the flow of air is completely obstructed. Stops may be nasal stops (such as [n]) or oral stops (such as [t]).

A form of prosodic prominence typically associated with greater length, greater loudness and higher pitch within the syllable. In many languages, there is more than one degree of stress. For example, in the English word international there is primary stress on the third syllable and secondary stress on the first syllable.

A phonological rule or morphological operation which involves changing the syllable in a word which carries primary stress.

Languages in which the time intervals between stressed vowels are roughly equal, e.g. English (cf. syllable-timed languages).

The form in which a word is pronounced when it is stressed. This term is usually applied only to words that normally occur unstressed and then are pronounced in their weak form, such as English to, a.

The property of phonological rules that outputs are modified to preserve the nature of underlying forms, especially in terms of what phonemes exist in the language.

A type of base modification that consists of deleting a segment (or more than a segment) from the base.