Glossary: morphology and phonology

An articulation made with the root of the tongue.

The fall in air pressure in an enclosed space caused by an increase in the size of the space without inflow of air. Relevant to the production of implosives.

A vowel that is pronounced with a noncontrasting centralized quality, although in the underlying form of a word it is part of a full set of contrasts. The second vowel in English emphasis is a reduced form of the vowel / æ /, as in emphatic.

The copied element in a reduplication process.

A morphological process that repeats all or part of a given base.

A construction in which agent and patient are coreferential.

In tone languages, a set of tones that are relatively high (high register) or relatively low (low register).

A lexical tone with a level pitch contour. Contrast contour tone.

A burst of noise produced when a stop consonant is released.

An instance of allomorphy that occurs in very few words and is not productive. Typically, relic alternations were productive at an earlier stage of the language, but subsequently levelled in all but a few (high frequency) words. E.g. the alternation between [ f ] and [ p ] in the English words father and paternal.

The frequency at which an acoustic system (including the vocal tract) vibrates when excited by input energy.

A verb form that highlights the result of the event (rather than the cause or the process of becoming).

Produced slightly further back in the vocal tract. For instance, the first consonant in the English word trip is a retracted alveolar (produced at the back of the alveolar ridge) because of the following [r] sound. Cf. advanced.

Consonant articulation involving the curled-up tip of the tongue and the back of the alveolar ridge or palate. Some speakers of English have retroflex approximants in rye and err. Retroflex stops occur in Hindi and other languages spoken in India.

The auditory property known as r-coloring that results from the lowering of the third formant.

(Or: rime) The part of the syllable consisting of the vowel (nucleus) and the following consonant(s). In the English word cram, for instance, the rhyme is /am/.

See trill.

The basic form from which another is derived by internal change or by addition of inflectional or derivational morphemes.

A type of morphology found especially in the Semitic languages where roots consist of a series of consonants, and derived and inflected forms are created by superimposing the root on a vocalic pattern. The pattern may also include certain consonants, although these can sometimes be analyzed as prefixes or suffixes.

A sound produced with protruded (=rounded) lips.