Glossary

Allophones are variations in pronunciation of a phoneme according to the surrounding environment e.g.: The “clear l” is pronounced in front of vowels while the dark l” is used after vowels.

Affixes are attached to a base form (root, stem) in order to form a word. There are prefixes which are attached before the root and suffixes that are attached after the root. In German you can also find circumfixes, which consist of two parts (geschaft) at the beginning and at the end of the word, as well as infixes. They are used to link two sepperate words and form a compound word (e.g. Liebesbrief).

Compounds are based on more than one root / stem. We have endocentric (bus-stop – a stop, but not a bus), bicentric (whisky-soda – whisky and soda) and exocentric (red-head – a person with a red-head) compounds. Synthetic compounds consist of derivation and compound (bus-driver).

Derivations are based on one root although the stem itself may consist of a stem with an affix (beauty + ful +ly) and may be defined by a recursive definition: A stem is a root (simplest case); a stem plus an affix (complex case) and nothing else.

Etymology is the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

(The) fundamental frequency (f0) is the lowest frequency in a harmonic series.

Grammatical morphemes are structural and a closed set. They may be bound (affixes, suffixes) or free like prepositions, conjunctions or auxiliary verbs.

(The) Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth.
Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages.

(The) harmonic is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. All harmonics are periodic at the signal frequency. If a sound is twice as high we speak of an octave.

Icons have a relationship of similarity with its meaning (visual and acoustic similarity). An example would be the similarity between animal sounds in a language (“miau”, “kikirikie”) and the animals we associate with them.

Index signs have a relationship of physical proximity with its meaning (place and cause). Examples would be:
- smoke is a sign for fire (cause)
- pointing at an existing thing (place)
- Some pronouns and adverbs (here and there, this and those, I and you)

(An) inflection has grammatical meaning and is supposed to relate a word to its semantic and syntactic context.

Lexical morphemes are an open set and carry meaning / content (e.g. ball, doll, sky).

(A) morpheme is the smallest unit of a language carrying meaning. It gets encoded by phonemes. A word may consist of one or more morphemes. There are two main morpheme types as there are lexical morphemes (content morpheme, root) and grammatical morphemes (structural morphemes). Lexical morphemes form an open group with free and bound (German) possibilities. Grammatical morphemes, on the contrast, represent a closed group also with free (e.g. preposition, conjunctions) and bound (affixes, suffices) members.
A free morphemes may form a single word (e.g. girl, table). A bound morphemes can only occur in connection with other morphemes (e.g. -s,-ing, - ize) or allomorphs, which are variations of a morpheme.

Paradigmatic relations classify relations of similarity and difference between signs (e.g .synonyms and antonyms).

Part of speech for English categories:
a) nouny categories:
- determiners (articles, possessives, demonstratives, relatives / interrogatives, quantifiers)
- adjectives (scalar, polar, appraisive, ordinal)
- nouns (proper nouns, common nouns)
- pronouns (personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns quantifier pronouns, relative pronouns)
b) verby categories
- verbs (main verbs, auxiliary verbs)
- adverbs (deictic, time, place / direction, manner, degree)
c) glue categories
- prepositions
- Conjunctions
- interjections

(A) phoneme can be described as the smallest word-distinguishing unit of speech. It consists of different phones. A group of phones that belong to the same phoneme are called allophones. They vary in pronunciation according to their environment. A phoneme can be determined by forming minimal-pairs.

(A) root is the smallest part of a word that carries meaning (morpheme) and therefore the smallest kind of a stem.

(The) spectrogram is the result of calculating the frequency spectrum of windowed frames of a compound signal. (…) In the most usual format, the horizontal axis represents time, the vertical axis is frequency, and the intensity of each point in the image represents amplitude of a particular frequency at a particular time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectogram).

(A) stem has lexical meaning (wonderful, blog, chair). The simplest case is a simplex word stem (e.g . you, oh, milk, ma, car) while complex word stems may be differentiate even further in a) derivations b) compounds (endocentric, bicentric, exocentric) and c) synthetic compound.

Structure is determined by constitutive relations, as there are structural relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) and semiotic relations (realisation and interpretation). Constitutive relations are supposed to relate to the real world.

(A) syllable consists of phonemes and organizes as a unit speech sounds. The general structure consists of onset, a rhyme, a nucleus (mostly a vowel) and a coda (typically a consonant).

Symbols have an arbitrary relationship with its meaning. Most words in a language are symbols because there is no acoustic resembles to the object.

Syntagmatic relations are combinatory relations which create larger signs (external structure) from smaller signs (internal structure).

Tree structure is an option to show a hierarchical nature of a structure (e.g. of the history of words) in a graphical form. The name is do to the fact that the diagram almost looks like a tree, although it is upside-down with the root at the top.

(A) word has the function to be the smallest meaning bearing part of a sentence. The external structure can be described as being the smallest invisible part of a sentence while the internal structure is a stem with inflection. The orthography and the phonology form the rendering.