Page 299 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 22: Morphological Analysis (Identification of Morphemes and Allomorph)

the different allomorphs of this prefix, and a rule of assimilation that derives its different surface Notes
forms.
Allomorphy is also found in root morphemes. In languages such as Dutch, German, and Polish,
obstruents (that is, stops and fricative consonants, which are articulated with a high degree of
obstruction in the mouth) are voiceless at the end of a word. Hence we get alternations of the following
kind in pairs of singular and plural nouns:
(10) Dutch hoed [hut] “hat” hoed-en [hud n]
e
German Tag [ta:k] “day” Tag-e [ta:g ] e
Polish chleb [xlep] “bread” chleb-y [xlebx]

The symbols between brackets represent the phonetic forms of these word forms; the phonetic symbols
are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This is the alphabet used in dictionaries
and grammars to indicate the phonetic forms of words in an unambiguous way. This is necessary
because orthographical conventions differ from language to language. For instance, the vowel [u] is
represented as u in German, but as oe in Dutch, as illustrated by the first example in (10).
Some linguists prefer to restrict the term ‘allomorphy’ to those cases in which the variation in phonetic
shape of a morpheme does not follow from the automatic phonological rules of the language. The
alternation between voiced and voiceless stops exemplified in (10) is determined by a phonological
constraint that excludes voiced obstruents in syllable-final (Dutch and German) or word-final (Polish)
position. Hence, the variation in shape of these morphemes is an automatic effect of the phonology of
the language. This is usually accounted for by assuming a common underlying form for the different
realizations of the morpheme involved, with a morpheme-final voiced obstruent. In the singular
forms that lack an overt ending, a process of syllable-final or word-final devoicing then applies. The
plural forms will not undergo this process because in these forms the relevant segments do not occur
in final position.
This type of alternation can be contrasted to the alternation between voiceless and voiced obstruents
in English, as in the singular-plural word pair wife-wives. This alternation applies to a small and
closed set of English words only. That is, there are alternations that are restricted to a specific set of
words. Another example is that the Dutch diminutive suffix has five different shapes (-tje, -je, -etje, -
pje, and -kje); the choice of one of these depends on the phonological composition of the stem. For
instance, the allomorph -je has to be selected after stems ending in an obstruent. The alternations
involved are unique to diminutive words, and do not follow from general phonological constraints
of Dutch. Therefore, a distinction is made between phonology proper (the variation of the kind
mentioned in (10) that is the effect of automatic phonological rules) and morphophonology, the
domain of phonology in which alternations are restricted to a specific subset of words. The term
‘allomorphy’ might therefore be reserved for such non-automatic alternations, which can be accounted
for in two ways. One option is to assume a common underlying form for the allomorphs, and derive
the surface forms by means of one or more morphophonological rules, that is, rules whose application
depends on non-phonological properties such as the feature DIMINUTIVE. Alternatively, the
allomorphs can be listed individually in their surface form, with a specification of the phonological
context in which they occur.
In some cases the non-automatic alternation is unique for one or a few words. For instance, the
English adjective platonic, related to the noun Plato, has the morphological structure platon-ic, with
the root platon- and the suffix -ic. The morpheme platon-, an allomorph of Plato, is a bound morpheme
since it does not occur as a word of its own. This kind of allomorphy, a heritage from Greek (in the
case of Plato) and Latin, increases the set of bound non-affixal morphemes enormously. An example
from the Latinate substratum of English is act, act-or vs ag-ent with the bound root ag-. Although it has
to be listed, the allomorph platon- does not require its own entry in the lexicon: it can be specified in
the lexical entry for Plato as the allomorph to be used for the derivation of words from Plato by means
of non-native suffixes. The same applies to the bound root ag-.

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