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Morphemes, morphs and allomorphs
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Lecture 4
Morphemes, morphs and allomorphs
Content
01
1. What is a morpheme?
2. What is a morph?
3. What is allmorph?
4. Complementary distribution and
Phonologically conditioning
5. Discussion
What is morpheme?
02
The minimal meaningful units of language are morphemes. The word hunter consists of three morphemes: hunt, -er, -s.
Root: hunt
Stem: hunter
Morph
03
A morph is a physical form representing some morpheme in a language. Example: He repaired his car last year. There are 7 morphs in the sentence: he, repair-ed, his, car, last,year.
Morph
Sometimes different morphs may represent the same morpheme. For instance, the past tense of regular verbs in English which is spelled –ed is realized in speech by /id/, /d/, or /t/.
Allomorph
If different morphs represent the same morpheme, they are grouped together and they are called allomorphs of that morpheme. /id/, /d/ and /t/ are grouped together as allomorphs of the past tense morpheme in English. Allomorphs are the morphemes having the same function but different form.
The relationship between morphemes, allomorphs
and morphs can be represented using a diagram
in the following way:
We classify a set of morphs as allomorphs of the same morpheme if they are in complementary distribution. Morphs are said to be in complementary distribution, if they represent the same meaning or serve the same grammatical function.
So, the three morphs /-id/, /-d/ and /-t/ are in complementary distribution.
Phonologically conditioning
If a morpheme has several allomorphs, the choice of allomorph used in a given context is normally phonologically conditioned.
The choice of allomorph of the English regular past tense morpheme is phonologically conditioned.
Discussion
Analyze the allomorphs of plural morpheme in English.
1. Draw a diagram showing the relationship between morphemes, allomorphs and morphs of the plural morpheme –s.
2. Transcribe each noun and focus on the pronunciation of the underlined part of each word which represents the plural morpheme –s.
3. How are they realized in speech? Explain it from linguistic aspects.