manner of articulation
Describes how sound is formed as the airstream travels through the vocal tract; stop, nasal, affricate, fricative.
marked
A linguistic element which has had a feature added to the unmarked representation. ex: morphology: singular noun book is unmarked; plural noun books is marked. phonetics: [t] voiceless alveolar stop is unmarked; [d] voiced alveolar stop is marked.
mass noun
A noun whose referential cannot be counted. ex: water, mud, oxygen
maxim
A conversational form regarding guidelines for discourse. ex: maxim of manner (one should be brief and clear) , maxim of quality (one should always tell the truth),maxim of relevance (one should always be connected to the conversation at hand), maxim of quantity (one should contribute that which is required in the discourse, not more, not less).
Maxim of Manner
An utterance must be clear, void of obscurity and ambiguity, delivered in an orderly fashion.
Maxim of Quality
Only say what you know to be true. (Do not lie.)
Maxim of Quantity
An utterance must be as informative as necessary without being more informative than necessary. In other words, do not say too much or too little.
Maxim of Relevance
Only state facts or opinions related to the topic at hand.
mean length of utterances (MLU)
A manner of estimating a child’s stage of language acquisition by counting words or morphemes in his/her utterance.
metaphony
Metaphony is a specific type of vowel harmony, often seen in Romance languages, in which a high vowel will cause a preceding non-high vowel to raise. Furthermore, the target vowel will always be stressed. EX: Italian ‘ver.de green/singular becomes ‘vir.di/green plural The plural morpheme [i] which is high, has a raising effect on the previous non-high vowel [e].
metaphor
An expression which attributes the quailities of another object to itself. ex: ‘The fury of the clouds descended on us’ describes an approaching storm.
metathesis
A phonological process in which phonological segments are reversed. ex: spaghetti –> pasketti
mid (vowel)
A vowel sound which is produced with the tongue positioned neither high nor low in theoral cavity. ex: [e], [o]
minimal pair
Two or more words which are identical except for one sound. ex: bit/sit
modularity
In psycholinguistics, modularity refers to the fact that in language processing, more than one system or ‘module’ (linguistic aspect) can operate independently of others. The term can also refer to the fact that language processing is independent from other cognitive areas such as memory and acquisition.
monophthong
A vowel which consists of a simple sound. ex: [a]
monosyllabic
An utterance consisting of one syllable. ex: hit
morpheme
The smallest unit of linguistic meaning in a language; may be a word or an affix.
morphology
Morphology is the study of word formation and construction in terms of discrete units of meaning, i.e.,morphemes such as affixes, root words, stems, and parts of speech.
motherese
Child Directed Speech. Intentionally exaggerated speech which adults often use with babies and young children (baby talk).
movement
The process by which a syntactic unit moves from deep structure position to a surface structure position. ex: yes/no questions
multilateral
A term used to describe the contrast of features in sets of phonemes. In English, /t/ and /f/ are inmultilateral opposition, since these phones can be contrasted on several levels, i.e., voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation.