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  • Morphophonemic: Morphemes Phonemic

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    Morphophonemic

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    96 views2 pages

    Morphophonemic: Morphemes Phonemic

    Uploaded by

    Arfan Hakim
    morpho

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 2

    Morphophonemic

    When morphemes combine, they influence each other's sound structure (whether


    analyzed at a phonetic or phonemic level), resulting in different variant
    pronunciations for the same morpheme. Morphophonology attempts to analyze these
    processes. A language's morphophonological structure is generally described with a
    series of rules which, ideally, can predict every morphophonological alternation that
    takes place in the language.
    An example of a morphophonological alternation in English is provided by
    the plural morpheme, written as "-s" or "-es". Its pronunciation alternates
    between [s], [z], and [ɪz], as in cats, dogs, and horses respectively. A purely
    phonological analysis would most likely assign to these three endings the phonemic
    representations /s/, /z/, /ɪz/. On a morphophonological level, however, they may all be
    considered to be forms of the underlying object //z//, which is a morphophoneme.
    The different forms it takes are dependent on the segment at the end of the morpheme
    to which it attaches: the dependencies are described by morphophonological rules.
    (The behaviour of the English past tense ending "-ed" is similar: it can be
    pronounced /t/, /d/ or /ɪd/, as in hoped, bobbed and added.)
    The plural suffix "-s" can also influence the form taken by the preceding morpheme,
    as in the case of the words leaf and knife, which end with [f] in the singular/but
    have [v] in the plural (leaves, knives). On a morphophonological level, the
    morphemes may be analyzed as ending in a morphophoneme //F//, which
    becomes voiced when a voiced consonant (in this case the //z// of the plural ending) is
    attached to it. The rule may be written symbolically as /F/ -> [αvoice] / __ [αvoice].
    This expression is called Alpha Notation in which α can be +(positive value) or -
    (negative value).
    Common conventions to indicate a morphophonemic rather than phonemic
    representation are double slashes (//  //) (as above, implying that the transcription is
    'more phonemic than simply phonemic'), pipes (|  |), double pipes (‖  ‖)[1] and curly
    brackets ({  }).[2]
    For instance, the English word cats may be transcribed phonetically as [ˈkʰæts],
    phonemically as /ˈkæts/ and morphophonemically as //ˈkætz//, if the plural is argued
    to be underlyingly //z//, assimilating to /s/ after a voiceless nonsibilant. The tilde ~
    may indicate morphological alternation, as in //ˈniː~ɛl+t// for kneel~knelt (the plus
    sign '+' indicates a morpheme boundary).[3]

    Types of changes[edit]
    Inflected and agglutinating languages may have extremely complicated systems of
    morphophonemics. Examples of complex morphophonological systems include:
     Sandhi, the phenomenon behind the English examples of plural and past tense
    above, is found in virtually all languages to some degree. Even Mandarin, which
    is sometimes said to display no morphology, nonetheless displays tone sandhi, a
    morphophonemic alternation.
     Consonant gradation, found in some Uralic languages such
    as Finnish, Estonian, Northern Sámi, and Nganasan.
     Vowel harmony, which occurs in varying degrees in languages all around the
    world, notably Turkic languages.
     Ablaut, found in English and other Germanic languages. Ablaut is the
    phenomenon wherein stem vowels change form depending on context, as in
    English sing, sang, sung.

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