Glossary: morphology and phonology

A morphological operation that cannot be straightforwardly described as stringing together of two morphemes.

Of airstream mechanisms: not involving air from the lungs. The two non-pulmonic airstream mechanisms used for speech are glottalic and velaric.

See nonsense word.

A word that appears only once in a given corpus or that was created on the fly and used only once.

A word that could have been a word in a particular language (i.e. which observes the language's phonotactics), but happens not to be. E.g. plim in English.

A word that can function as the syntactic head of a noun phrase (NP). For example, book is the head of the noun phrase this excellent book about Mars. In many languages, nouns inflect for number, gender, and case.

See gender.

Noun + verb compounding in which the verb is the head; found especially in polysynthetic languages.

(=peak). The vowel or diphthong in a syllable, which, usually, is the only obligatory part of the syllable. E.g. in the syllable /pak/, the vowel /a/ forms the nucleus.

The morphological categories that express contrasts involving countable quantity, which may be singular if the category is associated with nouns with a single referent; dual if associated with two referents; trial if associated with three referents; paucal if associated with a small number of referents; or plural if associated with more than one referent. Languages vary in which of these categories they encode.