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Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words. Morphophonological analysis often involves an attempt to give a series of formal
rules Rule or ruling may refer to: Education * Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE), a university in Cambodia Human activity * The exercise of political or personal control by someone with authority or power * Business rule, a rule perta ...
or constraints that successfully predict the regular sound changes occurring in the morphemes of a given language. Such a series of rules converts a theoretical
underlying representation In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phono ...
into a surface form that is actually heard. The units of which the underlying representations of morphemes are composed are sometimes called morphophonemes. The surface form produced by the morphophonological rules may consist of
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
s (which are then subject to ordinary phonological rules to produce speech sounds or ''
phones A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
''), or else the morphophonological analysis may bypass the phoneme stage and produce the phones itself.


Morphophonemes and morphophonological rules

When morphemes combine, they influence each other's sound structure (whether analyzed at a phonetic or
phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
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 varies among , , and , as in ''cats'', ''dogs'', and ''horses'' respectively. A purely phonological analysis would most likely assign to these three endings the phonemic representations , , . On a morphophonological level, however, they may all be considered to be forms of the underlying object , which is a morphophoneme realized as one of the phonemic forms . 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 , or , 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 in the singular/but have in the plural (''leaves'', ''knives''). On a morphophonological level, the morphemes may be analyzed as ending in a morphophoneme , which becomes voiced when a voiced consonant (in this case the of the plural ending) is attached to it. The rule may be written symbolically as -> �voice/ �voice 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 include double slashes (⫽  â«½) (as above, implying that the transcription is 'more phonemic than simply phonemic'). This is the only convention consistent with the IPA. Other conventions include pipes (,   , ), double pipes (‖  â€–) and braces (). Braces, from a convention in set theory, tend to be used when the phonemes are all listed, as in and for the English plural and past-tense morphemes ⫽z⫽ and ⫽d⫽ above. For instance, the English word ''cats'' may be transcribed phonetically as , phonemically as and morphophonemically as , if the plural is argued to be underlyingly , assimilating to after a voiceless nonsibilant. The tilde ~ may indicate morphological alternation, as in or for ''kneel~knelt'' (the plus sign '+' indicates a morpheme boundary).Collinge (2002) ''An Encyclopedia of Language'', §4.2.


Types of changes

Inflected and agglutinating languages may have extremely complicated systems of morphophonemics. Examples of complex morphophonological systems include: *
Sandhi Sandhi ( sa, सनà¥à¤§à¤¿ ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
, 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 Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...
, nonetheless displays tone sandhi, a morphophonemic alternation. *
Consonant gradation Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation bet ...
, found in some Uralic languages such as Finnish,
Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also * ...
,
Northern Sámi Northern or North Sámi ( ; se, davvisámegiella ; fi, pohjoissaame ; no, nordsamisk; sv, nordsamiska; disapproved exonym Lappish or Lapp) is the most widely spoken of all Sámi languages. The area where Northern Sámi is spoken covers the ...
, and Nganasan. * Vowel harmony, which occurs in varying degrees in languages all around the world, notably Turkic languages. *
Ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and i ...
, 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''.


Relation with phonology

Until the 1950s, many phonologists assumed that
neutralizing A neutralizing antibody (NAb) is an antibody that defends a cell from a pathogen or infectious particle by neutralizing any effect it has biologically. Neutralization renders the particle no longer infectious or pathogenic. Neutralizing antibo ...
rules generally applied before allophonic rules. Thus phonological analysis was split into two parts: a morphophonological part, where neutralizing rules were developed to derive phonemes from morphophonemes; and a purely phonological part, where phones were derived from the phonemes. Since the 1960s (in particular with the work of the
generative Generative may refer to: * Generative actor, a person who instigates social change * Generative art, art that has been created using an autonomous system that is frequently, but not necessarily, implemented using a computer * Generative music, mus ...
school, such as Chomsky and Halle's ''
The Sound Pattern of English ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (frequently referred to as ''SPE'') is a 1968 work on phonology (a branch of linguistics) by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. In spite of its title, it presents not only a view of the phonology of English, but also ...
'') many linguists have moved away from making such a split, instead regarding the surface phones as being derived from the underlying morphophonemes (which may be referred to using various terminology) through a single system of (morpho)phonological rules. The purpose of both phonemic and morphophonemic analysis is to produce simpler underlying descriptions for what appear on the surface to be complicated patterns. In purely phonemic analysis the data is just a set of words in a language, while for the purposes of morphophonemic analysis the words must be considered in grammatical paradigms to take account of the underlying morphemes. It is postulated that morphemes are recorded in the speaker's " lexicon" in an invariant (morphophonemic) form, which, in a given environment, is converted by rules into a surface form. The analyst attempts to present as completely as possible a system of underlying units (morphophonemes) and a series of rules that act on them, so as to produce surface forms consistent with the linguistic data.


Isolation forms

The isolation form of a morpheme is the form in which that morpheme appears in isolation (when it is not subject to the effects of any other morpheme). In the case of a
bound morpheme In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, ...
, such as the English past tense ending "-ed", it is generally not possible to identify an isolation form since such a morpheme does not occur in isolation. It is often reasonable to assume that the isolation form of a morpheme provides its underlying representation. For example, in some varieties of
American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...
, ''plant'' is pronounced , while ''planting'' is , where the morpheme "plant-" appears in the form . Here, the underlying form can be assumed to be , corresponding to the isolation form, since rules can be set up to derive the reduced form from this (but it would be difficult or impossible to set up rules that would derive the isolation form from an underlying ). That is not always the case, however; the isolation form itself is sometimes subject to neutralization that does not apply to some other instances of the morpheme. For example, the French word ''petit'' ("small") is pronounced in isolation without the final sound, but in certain derived forms (such as the feminine ''petite''), the is heard. If the isolation form were adopted as the underlying form, the information that there is a final "t" would be lost, and it would then be difficult to explain the appearance of the "t" in the inflected forms. Similar considerations apply to languages with
final obstruent devoicing Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as Catalan, German, Dutch, Breton, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents in fi ...
, in which the isolation form undergoes loss of voicing contrast, but other forms may not. If the grammar of a language is assumed to have two rules, rule A and rule B, with A ordered before B, a given derivation may cause the application of rule A to create the environment for rule B to apply, which was not present before the application of rule A. Both rules then are in a ''feeding relationship''. If rule A is ordered before B in the derivation in which rule A destroys the environment to which rule B applies, both rules are in a ''bleeding order''. If A is ordered before B, and B creates an environment in which A could have applied, B is then said to counterfeed A, and the relationship is ''counterfeeding''. If A is ordered before B, there is a ''counterbleeding'' relationship if B destroys the environment that A applies to and has already applied and so B has missed its chance to bleed A. ''Conjunctive ordering'' is the ordering that ensures that all rules are applied in a derivation before the surface representation occurs. Rules applied in a feeding relationship are said to be ''conjunctively ordered''. ''Disjunctive ordering'' is a rule that applies and prevents the other rule from applying in the surface representation. Such rules have a bleeding relationship and are said to be ''disjunctively ordered''.


Orthography

The principle behind
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letter (alphabet), letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character ...
ic writing systems is that the letters (
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
s) represent
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
s. However, many orthographies based on such systems have correspondences between graphemes and phonemes that are not exact, and it is sometimes the case that certain spellings better represent a word's morphophonological structure rather than the purely-phonological structure. An example is that the English plural morpheme is written ''-s'', regardless of whether it is pronounced or : ''cats'' and ''dogs'', not ''dogz''. The above example involves active morphology ( inflection), and morphophonemic spellings are common in this context in many languages. Another type of spelling that can be described as morphophonemic is the kind that reflects the etymology of words. Such spellings are particularly common in English; examples include ''science'' vs. ''unconscious'' , ''prejudice'' vs. ''prequel'' , ''sign'' ''signature'' , ''nation'' vs. ''nationalism'' , and ''special'' vs. ''species'' . For more detail on this topic, see Phonemic orthography, particularly the section on Morphophonemic features.


References


Bibliography

* Hayes, Bruce (2009). "Morphophonemic Analysis" ''Introductory Phonology'', pp. 161–185. Blackwell {{Authority control Linguistic morphology Phonology Orthography