Glossary: morphology and phonology

See Optimality Theory.

Typical, most representative, e.g. a canonical iamb.

A set of agreed vowel qualities, first defined by Daniel Jones, that can be used as a language-independent reference for the purpose of describing vowels encountered in speech.

In phonetic or psycholinguistic research, a short sentence in which the target word is embedded. Example: "I said X two times", where X is the target word. Among other things, the goal is to ensure consistent focus, and avoid assimilation across word boundaries as well as list intonation.

A morphological category that encodes information about a word’s grammatical role, e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor.

A characteristic of the perception of speech sounds. Sounds are said to be perceived categorically if there is a sharp cross-over from one perceptual category (e.g. /t/) to another (e.g. /d/) and if, in addition, human listeners are unable to distinguish between acoustically different sounds that fall in the same category.

A morphological process which turns the meaning of a verb x into a verb 'make, cause x'. E.g. English 'to lay' is an old causative derived from 'to lie'.

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.

A higher variant of a vowel, as in close-mid [e] as opposed to open-mid [ε]. Contrast with open.

See mid.

A syllable that has a consonant at the end, such as English tick. Contrast open syllable.

Coalescence is the phonological process in which two segments merge. The change of /np/ to [m] may be described as coalescence (taking nasality from /n/ and labiality from /p/), just like vowel nasalization and monopthongization (/ai/) --> /e/).

Coarticulation happens when the movements in the vocal tract necessary to produce one sound also influence another neighbouring sound. Coarticulation is sometimes regarded as an automatic phonetic effect (distinct from assimilation, which is regarded as a phonological rule). See also anticipatory coarticulation and perseverative coarticulation.

The organ of hearing. A spiral structure in the inner ear where mechanical vibrations are converted to nerve impulses, which are then sent to the brain.

Binaural hearing (using both ears) helps us to separate interesting sounds from a background of irrelevant noise. In a room where several conversations are taking place, one can focus on one of them and ignore the rest: the cocktail party effect.

The consonant(s) in a syllable that follow the vowel. E.g. in the syllable /pak/, the /k/ forms the coda.

A model of auditory word recognition in which listeners are assumed to develop a group of candidates, a word initial cohort, and then determine which member of that cohort corresponds to the presented word.

The shared understanding of those involved in the conversation.

The skill associated with using a language appropriately and effectively in various social situations.

In degree systems, the degree with the meaning ‘having a higher degree, more’.

Sometimes when a consonant is deleted (especially if it is in the coda, and especially if it is a sonorant), a (usually preceding) short vowel becomes long; this is referred to as compensatory lengthening. This process usually takes place historically, i.e. in language change.

The knowledge that speakers have of their language. Contrasts with performance.

Two sounds are said to be in complementary distribution in a particular language if they can never appear in the same phonetic environment. For example, aspirated stops in English always appear in absolute syllable-initial position in a stressed syllable, while unaspirated stops appear in other positions. Thus, these two types of allophones are in complementary distribution.

A morphological form that consists of more than one morpheme, whether it be two or more stems (compound word) or a stem plus one or more affixes, e.g., bookstore, optimality.

Defined (e.g., a word) entirely in terms of its parts.

A derived form resulting from the combination of two or more lexemes, e.g., space + ship > spaceship.

The rise in air pressure in an enclosed space caused by a decrease in the size of the space without outflow of air.

Term that describes morphology that builds words by the linear addition of morphemes (contrast non-concatenative).

See agreement.

In mood systems, the mood that indicates a hypothetical, unrealized action.

The environments in which different allomorphs of the same morpheme occur.

The set of forms associated with a verbal lexeme.

A model of cognitive/linguistic processes that assumes (1) a vast interconnected network of information nodes in which each node influences and is influenced by a large number of adjacent nodes and (2) parallel processing of information. Also called parallel distributed processing.

Sounds made with a relatively close constriction or complete closure in the vocal tract, which typically occur alone or in clusters at the beginning or end of syllables.

Agreement with respect to one or more features between consonants that are not adjacent to one another (cf. vowel harmony). Consonant harmony is uncommon in adult languages but frequently reported in child language.

The set of contrastive consonants found in a particular language.

A unit within the structure of a syllable, word or sentence.

A well-formedness condition on phonological structure. Constraints (instead of rules) form the basis of Optimality Theory.

A word such as calendar, sadness, die, speak, quiet, quickly, or tomorrow that refers to objects, events, and abstract concepts; contrasts with function word. Also called lexical word.

See environment.

Said of inflection that involves a simple directional mapping between a morphosyntactic feature and a particular phonological string. An example is the suffix -ing on present participles in English, because all present participles bear the same suffix. Contrasts with context-sensitive inflection.

Said of inflection when the realization of a morphosyntactic feature varies. An example is past tense in English, which may be realized by ablaut, suppletion, or the addition of a suffix. Contrasts with context-free inflection.

A lexical tone that displays a change in pitch.

The situation where a phonetic difference is capable of signalling a difference in word meaning in a particular language. For instance, vowel nasalization in French can change the identity of a word, as can be seen in the pair of words (a minimal pair) mot [mo] 'word' and mon [mõ] 'my'. This pair of words shows that there is a contrast between oral [o] and nasal [õ] in French (in other words, /o/ and /õ/ are different phonemes in French). English also has oral and nasalized vowels phonetically, but these vowels never contrast (in other words, they are allophones of the same phoneme).

See zero-derivation.

The most frequent syllable in languages; the CV syllable. All languages are believed to have this kind of syllable (as opposed to more complex syllable structures, such as CCV or CVC).

A term for sounds articulated with the tip or blade of the tongue raised toward the teeth or the alveolar ridge (or, sometimes, the hard palate), such as [ θ, s, t ].

A noun that can refer to individual entities, and can have both singular and plural forms (e.g. English table) (cf. mass noun).

A type of phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate at a low frequency (and usually somewhat irregularly) with a very low rate of airflow through the glottis. Sometimes referred to as laryngealization or as 'vocal fry'.

A ring-shaped cartilage at th top of the windpipe. It is attached to the thyroid cartilage; the arytenoid sit on its upper surface at the rear.

Part of the acoustic signal that is used (by listeners) for identifying a sound.

The presence of more acoustic cues than are logically necessary to signal a perceptual distinction between speech sounds.

See exponence.

A representation of the structure of a word or phrase in terms of the sequence of consonant and vowel sounds it contains. C is used to represent consonants and V to represent vowels. For instance, CVCV will be the CV-skeleton for English words such as below, city or data.

This is an approach to morphology-phonology interaction. Whenever an affix is added (for instance to a stem), a phonological rule applies. E.g. the English word cyclicity itself consists of [cyclic] + [ity]. When -ity is attached, the final [k] changes into [s]: we call this cyclic rule application, or we can refer to -ity as a "cyclic" affix. (Note that the word cyclic itself can also be analysed as morphologically complex: [cycle] + [ic])