Jon's Page O' Linguistics - Terms

Accepted Pronunciation (AP):

n: The accepted pronunciation of English words.   Refers to the pronunciation of English speaking inhabitants of South England which have been publically educated.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA):

n: A set of characters/symbols used to represent all the sounds of human languages.

Consonant:

n: An articulate sound which in utterance is usually combined and sounded with an open sound called a vowel; a member of the spoken alphabet other than a vowel; also, a letter or character representing such a sound.

Vowel:

n: A speech sound made with the vocal tract open.

Word:

n: The spoken sign of a conception or an idea; an articulate or vocal sound, or a combination of articulate and vocal sounds, uttered by the human voice, and by custom expressing an idea or ideas; a single component part of human speech or language; a constituent part of a sentence; a term; a vocable.

Syllable:

n:  An elementary sound, or a combination of elementary sounds, uttered       together, or with a single effort or impulse of the voice, and constituting a word or a part of a word. In other terms, it is a vowel or a diphtong, either by itself or flanked by one or more consonants, the whole produced by a single impulse or utterance.

Voice:

n: Sound uttered by the mouth, especially that uttered by human beings in speech or song; sound thus uttered considered as possessing some special quality or character; as, the human voice; a pleasant voice; a low voice.

Voiced:

adj: Furnished with a voice; expressed by the voice. 2. (Phon.) Uttered with voice; pronounced with vibrations of the vocal cords; sonant; -- said of a sound uttered with the glottis narrowed

Voiceless

adj: A consonant made with no audible sound except in the transition to or from another sound

Breathed:

adj: Uttered without voice;

Glide:

n. A transitional sound in speech which is produced by the changing of the mouth organs from one definite position to another, and with gradual change in the most frequent cases; as in passing from the begining to the end of a regular diphthong, or from vowel to consonant or consonant to vowel in a syllable, or from one component to the other of a double or diphthongal consonant.

Diphthong:

n: A coalition or union of two vowel sounds pronounced in one syllable; as, ou in out, oi in noise.

Fricative:

n: Produced by the friction or rustling of the breath, intonated or unintonated, through a narrow opening between two of the mouth organs; uttered through a close approach, but not with a complete closure, of the organs of articulation, and hence capable of being continued or prolonged; -- said of certain consonantal sounds, as f, v, s, z, etc.

Stop:

n: Produced by some part of the articulating organs, as the lips, or the tongue and palate, closed so as to cut off the passage of breath or voice through the mouth and the nose.

Sonorant:

adj:A sound produced by means of an open resonant (nasal) cavity.

Plosive:

adj: Produced by complete closure of the oral passage and subsequent release with a burst of air (as `p' and `d' in `pit' or `dog')

Affricate:

n: A combination of a stop, or explosive, with an immediately following fricative or spirant of corresponding organic position

Glottal stop:

n: A stop consonant articulated by releasing pressure at the glottis; as in the sudden onset of a vowel

Approximant:

n: Produced when the speech organs approach eachother but do not touch.  Varries greatly.

Phoneme:

n: One of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language

Allophone:

n : Any of various acoustically different forms of the same phoneme

Phonetic Transcription:

n : A transcription intended to represent each distinct speech sound with a separate symbol

Intonation:

n: Rise and fall of the voice pitch.

Morpheme:

n : Minimal meaningful language unit.  It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units

Bound morpheme:

n : A morpheme that occurs only as part of a larger construction; eg an -s at the end of plural nouns.

Free Morpheme:

n : A morpheme that can occur alone.

Grammatical Words:

n: A classification of words based on part of speech into which no other words can be added.

Lexical Words:

n: A clasification of words based on part of speecg into which new words can be added.

Page constructed and maintained by Jonathan D. Pettus
Email: [email protected]