MORA

1. (Phonology) A unit of syllable weight in moraic theory. Moras are the units to which metrical structure may refer.
    E.g., long vowels are often considered to be bimoraic, while short ones are monomoraic. This would explain the difference in behavior with respect to stress rules between these two classes of vowels in quantity-sensitive languages. (Hyman 1985, McCarthy and Prince 1986, Prince 1983, Van der Hulst 1984) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Phonology) Plural, morae or moras. Often symbolized μ. A basic timing unit in some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ba consists of one mora (monomoraic), while a long syllable such as baa consists of two (bimoraic); extra-long syllables with three moras (trimoraic) are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as syllable weight.
    The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate the Greek word χρόνος (chrónos, 'time') in its metrical sense. | Wikipedia, 2022

MORA AUGMENTATION
(Morphology) Morphological mora augmentation is a straightforward case of prosodic morphology. Aronoff and Fudeman (2005) provide the following characterization of this field of linguistic inquiry:

Prosodic morphology deals with the interaction of morphology and prosodic structure. Prosodic structure, in turn, is particularly concerned with the timing units of languages, e.g., the word and syllable, and vowel length.

MORIBUND LANGUAGE

1. (Diachronic) We see languages at various stages of endangerment. In the earliest stages, because children want or are forced to speak the language of a dominant group, they shy away from using their ancestral tongue. Soon a language becomes moribund, with no child speakers left. Then, as the speakers age and are not replaced, the language undergoes a process of invisibilization. The pool of users becomes smaller and less active. People begin to forget the language. Eventually, it may go extinct. | Ironbound Films, 2009
2. (Diachronic) Nearly half of the world's languages are already moribund, that is, are no longer being learned by children. | ?

MORPHOLOGICAL IMPOVERISHMENT
(Distributed Morphology) One of the central postsyntactic operations employed in DM. It was first proposed by Bonet (1991), and has been adopted, in varying forms, by much subsequent work (e.g., Noyer 1992, 1997, Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, Halle 1997, Harris 1997, Bobaljik 2002, Frampton 2002, Harley 2004, 2008, Embick and Noyer 2007, Arregi and Nevins 2012). Broadly speaking, impoverishment is an operation that deletes morphosyntactic features postsyntactically, a process that affects morphological exponence in systematic ways. Impoverishment is made available by the core assumption in DM that morphology is postsyntactic, or realizational in Stump's (2001) terminology. According to this assumption, syntax operates on abstract feature structures that lack phonological information. This phonological information is added postsyntactically, at the PF branch of the grammar, a process called vocabulary insertion. Thus, in this view, morphology realizes, rather than forms, syntactic feature bundles. Impoverishment modifies the syntactic feature bundles at PF but prior to vocabulary insertion, thus affecting morphological exponence.
 Impoverishment is part of a broader class of postsyntactic operations, which also encompasses fusion rules, fission rules, and the like, all of which modulate syntactic feature structures prior to vocabulary insertion. While it applies before, and hence affects, vocabulary insertion, it is part of the PF branch of the grammar. Consequently, it affects neither the LF nor narrow syntax. As a result, both syntax and semantic interpretation operate on complete, unimpoverished feature representations. | Stefan Keine and Gereon Müller, 2022

MORPHOLOGICAL UNIFORMITY
(Morphology) Let us say that given a word W of category K, W is underived if it is morphologically non-distinct from the stem (or root) of W (i.e., if it does not contain any affixes attached to W). Further, let us say that a word W′ is derived if it is formed of a stem (or root) W plus an affix attached to W. (These affixes need not be limited to prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. In some instances other morphological processes of inflection may occur, such as suppletion, reduplication, stem vowel alternations, or filling consonantal skeleta with the appropriate vowels). Now we can state what we mean by morphologically uniform.

Morphological Uniformity
An inflectional paradigm P in a language L is morphologically uniform iff P has either only underived inflectional forms or only derived inflectional forms.

MORPHOLOGICAL WORD
(Morphology) Todd (1987) states that we can isolate four of the most frequently implied meanings of word: the orthographic, the morphological, the lexical, and the semantic word.

1. An orthographic word is one which has a space on either side of it. For example, He had a book. There are four words in this sentence because each has a space on either side of it.
2. A morphological word is a unique form which considers only form not meaning. The word table, for instance, is one morphological word, but tables are two morphological words.
3. A lexical word covers the various forms of items which are closely related by meaning. Thus, take, takes, taking, took, taken, are five morphological words but only one lexical word. This is really similar to what Bauer (1983) defines as lexeme and word form.
4. A semantic word involves distinguishing between items which may be morphologically identical but have a different meaning. The word table, for instance, can refer to a piece of furniture or to a schedule. Thus, they belong to the same morphological word but they are also two semantic words because they are not closely related in meaning.

MORPHOLOGY AS SYNTAX
(Morphosyntax) 

Morphology as Syntax (MaS)
Morphological generalizations are accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles. There is no morphological component in UG. There are no post-syntactic morphological operations.

MORPHOME

1. (Morphology) A function which is purely morphological or has an irreducibly morphological component. The term is particularly used by Martin Maiden (2004) following Mark Aronoff's (1994) identification of morphomic functions and the morphomic level—a level of linguistic structure intermediate between and independent of phonology and syntax. In distinguishing this additional level, Aronoff makes the empirical claim that all mappings from the morphosyntactic level to the level of phonological realization pass through the intermediate morphomic level. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Morphology) The original definition of a morphome by Aronoff (1994) is that it is a function which determines the distribution of form within the inflectional paradigm and beyond. More importantly, however, morphomes suppose the existence of what Aronoff terms a morphomic level which embodies an empirical claim about the structure of language: "the mapping from morphosyntax to phonological realization is not direct but passes through an intermediate level". This is a strong claim concerning all types of morphological exponence. | Paul O'Neill, 2014
3. (Morphology) Three separate claims that are advanced by proponents of the morphome:
   1. The existence claim is the assertion that there exist morphomes in the narrow sense, i.e. systematic patterns of linguistic exponence whereby an arbitrary set of exponenda is mapped onto an arbitrary set of exponents. The existence claim leads to a diagnosis problem, arising from the fact that morphomicity is defined negatively, and to an analysis question, posed by the task of providing grammatical descriptions of putatively morphomic patterns.
   2. The no-bias claim holds that there is no learnability asymmetry between morphomic and nonmorphomic patterns: ceteris paribus, the former can be acquired as easily as the latter.
   3. The morphomic-level claim emerges from one possible answer to the analysis question: it is the hypothesis that there exists a purely morphological level of linguistic representation such that all patterns of exponence, whether morphomic in the narrow sense or not, are mediated by purely morphological categories existing at this level.
    | Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Ana R. Luís, 2016

MORPHOPHONOLOGY
(Morphology; Phonology) Or, morphophonemics or morphonology. The branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words.
 Morphophonological analysis often involves an attempt to give a series of formal rules or constraints that successfully predict the regular sound changes occurring in the morphemes of a given language. Such a series of rules converts a theoretical underlying representation into a surface form that is actually heard. The units of which the underlying representations of morphemes are composed are sometimes called morphophonemes. The surface form produced by the morphophonological rules may consist of phonemes (which are then subject to ordinary phonological rules to produce speech sounds or phones), or else the morphophonological analysis may bypass the phoneme stage and produce the phones itself. | Wikipedia, 2022

MORPHOPRAGMATICS
(Morphology; Pragmatics) The relationship between morphology and pragmatics, in other words, it investigates pragmatic aspects of patterns created by morphological rules. | Ferenc Kiefer, 2004

MORPHOSYNTACTIC WORD
(Syntax) Abbreviated MWd. Embick and Noyer (2001) make a distinction between two morphological objects, principally morphosyntactic words (MWd) and subwords (SWd), each of which displays distinct behavior and complies with distinct locality effects. The two are defined as follows:

MWd
A node X⁰ is (by definition) a morphosyntactic word (MWd) iff X⁰ is the highest segment of an X⁰ not contained in another X.

SWd
A node X⁰ is a subword (SWd) if X⁰ is a terminal node and not an MWd.

MORPHOSYNTAX

1. (Morphology; Syntax) Refers to the combination of morphology and syntax. Syntax is the analysis of the internal structure of utterances / sentences—more specifically, how words are put together. Morphology is the analysis of the internal structure of words, including prefixes, suffixes, and other internal changes to words that generally have a meaning (elusive as that meaning sometimes is). Therefore, morphosyntax is the analysis of the internal structure of utterances, both above the word level and below it.
    Why combine morphology and syntax? Because grammatical constructions involve both. Consider the examples of the English Numeral Modification Construction (ENMC) in (1):
   1.  English Numeral Modification
       one tree
       two tree-s
       three tree-s
       etc.
    The ENMC involves both syntax—the order of numeral and noun—and morphology—the form of the noun, singular or plural. A description or analysis of the ENMC must include reference to both: the relative position of numeral and noun, and the inflection of the noun for number. | William Croft, 2022
2. (Morphology; Syntax) The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact, is called morphosyntax (Dufter and Stark 2017, Bender 2013); the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated (Van Valin Jr and LaPolla 1997). The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation (Dufter and Stark 2017). Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government (Dufter and Stark 2017). | Wikipedia, 2024
3. (Examples) The 76 features fall into 11 groups corresponding to the following broad areas of morphosyntax, each of which we illustrate with one example feature:
   •  Pronouns
      For example, [#3] special forms or phrases for the second person plural pronoun (e.g., youse, y'all, aay', yufela, you together, all of you, you ones / 'uns, you guys, you people, etc.).
   •  Noun phrase
      For example, [#15] group plurals (e.g., That President has two Secretary of States).
   •  Tense and aspect
      For example, [#23] habitual do (e.g., He does catch fish pretty).
   •  Modal verbs
      For example, [#34] double modals (e.g., I tell you what we might should do).
   •  Verb morphology
      For example, [#41] a-prefixing on ing-forms (e.g., They wasn't a-doin' nothin' wrong).
   •  Adverbs
      For example, [#42] adverbs (other than degree modifiers) have same form as adjectives (e.g., He treated her wrong right from the start).
   •  Negation
      For example, [#44] multiple negation / negative concord (e.g., He won't do no harm).
   •  Agreement
      For example, [#57] deletion of be (e.g., She — smart).
   •  Relativization
      For example, [#66] gapping or zero-relativization in subject position (e.g., The man — lives there is a nice chap).
   •  Complementation
      For example, [#71] as what /than what in comparative clauses (e.g., It's harder than what you think it is).
   •  Discourse organization and word order
      For example, [#76] like as a quotative particle (e.g., And she was like, what do you mean?).
    | Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Bernd Kortmann, 2009

MORPHOTACTICS

1. (Morphology) The general principles by which the parts of a word form are arranged. | Gregory Stump, 2022
2. (Morphology) Refers literally to the question of which morphemes can "touch" or abut each other. But like phonotactics governs the fact that tk is not a licit sequence of consonants to end a syllable, there is often no problem with such sequences across syllables (or distinct words). Thus the study of morphotactics inherently is restricted to a particular domain. | Karlos Arregi and Andrew Nevins, 2022
3. (Morphology) The patterns according to which a language's word forms are internally structured constitute its morphotactics. In the morpheme-based approaches to morphology that emerged in the twentieth century, a language's morphotactic principles are constraints on the concatenation of morphemes (a perspective still held by many linguists); in rule-based conceptions of morphology, by contrast, a language's morphotactic principles are constraints on the interaction of its rules of morphology. | Gregory Stump, 2017

Page Last Modified April 28, 2024

 

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