Glossary: morphology and phonology

In aspect systems, the aspect that expresses that an event is repeated regularly.

See mid.

See mid.

A form that occurs only once in a corpus (plural: hapax legomena). Comes from the Greek for ‘said once’.

Process by which a segment or a sequence of segments is deleted if it immediately precedes or follows the same segment or sequence of segments.

The bony structure that forms the roof of the front part of the mouth.

See fortition.

A multiple of the fundamental frequency; also called overtone.

A word in a syntactic construction or a morpheme in a morphological one that determines the grammatical function or meaning of the construction as a whole. For example, house is the head of the noun phrase the red house, and read is the head of the word unreadable.

Syllables which consist of more than one mora. In stress theory, heavy syllables contain either a long vowel (as the first syllable in bacon) or a short vowel followed by a tautosyllabic consonant (as the first syllable in bunker). Heavy syllables attract stress (cf. light syllables, mora).

(of vowels). The degree of raising of the highest point of the tongue during the production of  vowel. Vowel height is usually divided into three or four degrees: high, mid, low or close, close-mid, open-mid and open.

The unit of frequency measure: 1 cycle per second.

Refers to a consonant cluster in which both consonants belong to different syllables, e.g. [kt] in octopus [ok.to.pus]. Contrast tautosyllabic.

A situation in which two vowels, typically in different words or morphemes, come up against each other (as in the word hiatus). Eliminated in many languages by epenthesis or other means.

The constituent structure of and dominance relations between elements in a syllable (onset, nucleus, coda, rhyme, segments), word (morphemes, bases) or sentence (words, phrases).

Sounds produced with a raised tongue body. For vowels, [i, u] as contrasted with [e, o].

One of two or more forms that sound the same but have different meanings, e.g., pear, pare, pair. Also called homophones.

See homonym.

Sharing the same place of articulation, e.g. the two consonants [mp] in the word impossible are homorganic.

The element to which a clitic attaches.

"Over-articulation": speaking with much articulatory effort. Contrast hypo-articulation.

The semantic relation between a more general word and a more specific word. Tree is a hyperonym of oak, because the set of trees includes the set of oaks. Hyperonymy is the converse of hyponymy.

"Under-articulation": speaking with reduced articulatory effort. Contrast hyper-articulation.

Diminutive or affectionate forms of proper names, e.g. Betty for Elizabeth in English.

The semantic relation between a more specific word and a more general word. Dog is a hyponym of animal, because all dogs are also animals, but not vice versa. Hyponymy is the converse of hyperonymy.

See zero-derivation.