Glossary: morphology and phonology

A sound produced with air flowing through the nasal passages. An example of a nasal consonant is [m] and an example of a nasal vowel is [ã].

The large cavity above the roof of the mouth, connected to the upper part of the pharynx at the rear and having the nostrils at the front.

A vowel sound produced without velic closure so that air escapes simultaneously though the oral and the nasal cavity. Also nasalised vowel.

See nasal vowel.

A set of speech sounds that behaves similarly, for instance in a historical sound change or synchronic process (e.g. all obstruents, all voiceless stops, all front vowels, etc.).

A new lexeme that is attested, but had not previously been observed in the language.

The study of how language is represented and processed in the brain.

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

If a language has two sounds which are distinct in one environment (e.g. word-initially), and not distinct in another environment (e.g. word-finally, or when not stressed, or in another particular position), then the distinction between the sounds is said to be neutralized in that environment. For instance, English has distinct t and d word-initially (as proven by minial pairs, such town and down) as well as word-finally (e.g. sent and send). After /s/, however, the distinction between the two sounds is neutralized: only /t/ appears (stem vs. *sdem).

In languages with grammatical case, the one typically used for subjects.

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.