Glossary: morphology and phonology

See fundamental frequency.

See formant.

See formant.

Faithfulness constraints (in Optimality Theory) encode the tendency to change as little as possible to the input: it is best (e.g. for word recognition) not to insert any segment, not to delete any segment, not to switch segments around, not to assimilate, not to coalesce, etc. If this does happen, there must be a markedness constraint triggering this. Related to correpondence, e.g. base-reduplicant correspondence.

Also called 'ventricular folds'. The false vocal folds form a second constriction, just above the true vocal folds. When the true vocal folds do not function properly (as in some pathological voices), the false vocal folds may be caused to vibrate.

See phonological features.

Refers to a number of theories that argue that distinctive features are organized hierarchically, i.e. in a tree structure.

In gender systems, one of the genders (cf. masculine, neuter).

In a person system, referring to the speaker, or including the speaker.

A language where the position of the primary stress is the same for the vast majority of words. For example, Polish is a fixed stress language because nearly all words have primary stress on the penultimate syllable.