Glossary: morphology and phonology

A vowel formed with the tongue horizontally positioned in the center of the space for vowel articulation, between front and back (compare mid for the vertical axis).

Speech addressed to children. See also motherese.

A bound morpheme made up of two parts, one that occurs before and one that occurs after the root. E.g. German ge-schrieb-en 'written'.

Term that refers to the form of a lexeme’s paradigm that is used by linguists to refer to the lexeme. Morphologists often give the citation form in small capital letters.

See primary affixes.

See secondary affixes.

A stop consonant produced by creating a vacuum inside the mouth with a raised back of the tongue and tongue tip or closed lips, i.e. having an ingressive velaric airstream mechanism. Employed linguistically in a limited number of African, especially Khoisan, languages. Extralinguistically, clicks occur in many languages, including English, e.g. to express disapproval (tut, tsk) or to spur on animals.

A word-formation process by which a word is created by lopping off part of another word, e.g. English Will < William.

A phonologically weak form that corresponds to a function word or another morpheme (e.g. genitive 's in English, 't (< het 'it'), 'm (< hem 'him'), etc. in Dutch, or -que 'and' in Latin) which becomes attached to a preceding or following word (called host or anchor), sometimes through a process of resyllabification.

An expression formed by one or more clitics and the host.