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• M The usual symbol for mid in tone or intonation studies.
• Malleus [ˈmælɪəs] See hammer.
• Manner of articulation An aspect of the production of consonant sounds. Often abbreviated to moa. Manner can be thought of as comprising a number of components:
  1. Rank of stricture: the constriction in the vocal tract may be (a) a complete closure (b) a constriction close enough to cause air turbulence (c) a wider approximation which does not cause turbulence when accompanied by moderate rate of airflow. Some writers add a fourth rank, that of resonant, which is an articulation where the constriction is so wide that no friction occurs at any rate of airflow. This latter is mainly found in the production of vowels.
  2. Speed of release of closure: this may be rapid as in a plosive sound or slower as in an affricate sound.
  3. Rate of articulation: an articulation overall may be rapid as in a tap or slower as in a plosive.
  4. Repetition: an articulation may be performed once only as in a plosive or tap, or it may be repeated rapidly as in a trill.
  5. Soft palate position: the soft palate may be raised resulting in an oral articulation or lowered for a nasal or nasalised articulation.
  6. Median vs lateral articulation.
• Maximal onset principle A phonological principle proposed by some writers which determines the placement of syllable boundaries in cases of doubt. The principle states that, unless doing so would violate universal or language-specific constraints, consonants should be assigned to the syllable onset rather than the syllable coda. For example, the English word extra could be syllabified [ek$strə] or [eks$trə] or [ekst$rə]. All other syllable divisions would result in illegal consonant clusters in English.  The principle favours the first of the versions shown.
• Max-IO See faithfulness constraint.
• McGurk effect A perceptual effect that demonstrates that visual cues influence the perception of speech sounds.  A video is shown of a speaker producing an utterance, but the sound of this is replaced by a recording of a different utterance by the same speaker.  For example, the picture may show the speaker producing the sequence [ɑɡɑ], while the sound-track is of the sequence [ɑbɑ].  This results in the perception of the sequence as [ɑdɑ] when the listener is watching the picture, but as [ɑbɑ] when she is not.  The effect was first reported in McGurk & MacDonald.  A demonstration can be found here
• Media An outdated term for a (voiced) unaspirated plosive.
• Median articulation An aspect of the manner of articulation of consonants, specifically fricatives and approximants. A median consonant has an obstruction on both sides of the oral cavity but an opening on the midline. For example,  [s θ ð w j] are all median consonants. See also lateral.
• Mel A unit of pitch. A pure tone at 1000 Hz is defined as having a pitch of 1000 mels. A frequency judged to be one tenth of the pitch of a 1000 Hz pure tone has a pitch of 100 mels and so on. The correlation between frequency measured in Hz and the pitch measured in mels is perfect in the low frequency region up to about 1500 Hz, but above this larger increases in frequency are needed to produce the same increase in perceived pitch.
• Melodic tier See autosegmental phonology.
• Merger Any change in pronunciation over time which destroys the contrast between two or more segments.  A simple example is the loss of contrast in many English accents between [ʍ] (as in which, what, when etc) and [w].
• Mesolect [ˈmiːzəʊlekt] See lect.
• Metathesis  [məˈtæθəsɪs] Any change in the order of adjacent segments in a word.  For example, Old English brid  [brid] compared with later English [bird].
• Metrical grid A graphical representation of the the relative prominence in a word or phrase. The horizontal axis consists of slots associated to the syllables of the word/phrase. The vertical axis consists of a number of levels, corresponding to the syllable, the foot, the word and so on. Prominence at a particular level is marked by the addition of * above the relevant syllable. Below is an example grid for the English word restoration
   

  Word level			*
  Foot level	*		*
  Syllable level	*	*	*	*
  	res	tor	a	tion

  
  
• Metrical phonology A branch of phonology concerned with the relative prominence of syllables in words or phrases.
• Metrical tree A graphical representation of the relative prominence in a word or phrase. The tree is a binary branching structure with each pair of nodes labelled s w or w s.
• Micro-intonation See pitch perturbation.
• Microprosody The same as micro-intonation.
• Mid-level The name of a nuclear tone in many analyses of English intonation. The pitch characteristics are: the contour starts at mid pitch in the speaker's pitch range and continues at this level until the end of the intonation group. See O'Connor & Arnold for more information.
• Mid vowel A vowel where the highest point of the tongue is between close-mid and open-mid. See height.
• Minimal focus Focus on the smallest possible constituent of an utterance. Prime examples of minimal focus are utterances where the polarity of the verb is regarded as the only new information. See the two converstional exchanges below, where underlining indicates the place of the intonational nucleus:
  • He said he's sent it
  • Well, he hasn't sent it.

  Here the nucleus placement indicates minimal focus on the negative polarity of the verb.

  • I thought he liked classical music.
  • He does like classical music.

  Here the positive polarity of the verb receives minimal focus.

• Minimal pair A pair of words which differ in only one sound, such as English pat and pot.
• Mirror-image convention An abbreviatory convention of rule-based generative phonology which collapses two rules which differ in the order of the elements of their environment.  For example, suppose a language has two rules which state that the segment X is deleted (1) before segment Y and (2) after segment Y, so the two environments are /__Y and /Y__.  The convention collapses these rules into one: X → 0 // Y, where the // indicates that this is a mirror-image rule.
• Missing fundamental See fundamental frequency.
• Modal voice A type of phonation where the vocal folds close very quickly and open much more slowly. Also called normal voice.
• Modulation  A periodic alteration in some parameter of a signal.  For example, a sine wave can have its amplitude changed (amplitude modulation or AM) or its frequency (frequency modulation or FM).
• Monophthong [ˈmɒnəfθɒŋ] (adj. monophthongal [ˌmɒnəfˈθɒŋɡl]) A vowel where there is no perceptible change in quality during a syllable. Also called pure vowel.
• Monosyllable [ˈmɒnəʊˌsɪləbl A word of one syllable.
• Mora [ˈmɔːrə] A unit of quantity or duration, usually symbolised μ. Morae can be viewed as components of the syllable. A long vowel, diphthong, or short vowel plus a coda consist of two morae, whereas a short vowel consists of one mora. Onset consonants do not have a mora value. An example from Japanese simbun (= newspaper):

  syllable		syllable
  µ	µ	µ	µ
  ɕi	m	bɯ	n

• Morpheme [ˈmɔːfiːm] The smallest linguistic structure which bears meaning. Take for example, the English word unbearable. This can be analysed as comprising three morphemes, the prefix un, the suffix able and the root bear. The last of these is a free morpheme, because it may occur alone. The first two are bound morphemes, because they do not occur alone, but are always attached to other morphemes.
• Morpheme boundary The beginning or end of a morpheme. This is usually symbolised as +. For example, the word books has the structure {book}+{plural}.
• Morphophonology The study of the phonological form of morphemes in a language.
• Motor theory A theory of speech perception which holds that a hearer perceives speech by reference to the movements that s/he would have to make to reproduce that speech.
• Murmur Another name for breathy voice.