Write 1-2 pages about:
Additional resources:
UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID)
Interactive IPA chart
Once we have the segments/primitive signals, the next step is to form meaningful expressions out of them (= morphemes/words)
Morphology is about:
A lot of arbitrariness, but there are still some principles
It's notoriously difficult to give a general definition of what a word is
As Haspelmath (2011) argues, there's no single typologically applicable definition
A morpheme is said to be the smallest meaningful expression
But not everything is so easily segmentable
(from Arkadiev 2020)
No need for a general definition of words or morphemes that applies to all languages
But you might want to define such terms for your language
Later, you'll be asked to make some words (based on the Leipzig-Jakarta word list)
Zipf's law: Word frequency is inversely proportional to rank (e.g., the most frequent word is twice as more frequent as the second most frequent word)
Zipf-Mandelbrot law for a better fit (e.g., , ):
see Wikipedia and Piantadosi 2014 for graphs
The brevity law (Zipf's law of abbreviation): More frequent words tend to be shorter
This need not be true in your language, but it's a reasonable law for any communication systems
See Bentz & Ferrer-i-Cacho 2016
Some languages have minimal word requirements, e.g. according to Van Urk (lecture notes) nouns and verbs in Imere must have three syllables
This is arguably related to stress (primary stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable in Imere)
Concatenative morphology
Non-concatinative morphology
Morpholological processes create related words
Allomorphy: The same morpheme might be relalised differently in the same paradigm
An extreme case of this is suppletion, e.g.
Allomophy may involve phonologically conditioned alternations, e.g.
See Odden 2005 for more examples
Arguably many phonological rules apply to solve phonetic/phonological issues (e.g., neutralise in perceptually less contrastive positions, break consonant clusters, etc.)
The phonological change tends to be minimal
Impossible morphophonological rules:
Your language can obey or disobey the brevity law
Your language can be morphologically simple or complex
You'll be asked to make some words and morphemes before Week 5
Klingon grammar