morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

-based morphology, the term null allomorph or zero allomorph is sometimes used to refer to some kind of

null morpheme In morphology, a null morpheme or zero morpheme is a morpheme that has no phonetic form. In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It is a concept useful for analysis, by contrasting null morphemes with alternatives that do have ...

for which there are also contexts in which the underlying morpheme is manifested in the surface structure. It is therefore also an

allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...

. The phenomenon itself is known as ''null allomorphy'', ''morphological blocking'' or ''total morpheme blocking''.

English

An example of null allomorphy in English is the

phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can con ...

''two fish-∅'' which cannot be ''two fish-es''. In addition, according to some linguists such as Radford, in children's language the forms of many

auxiliary verb An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a ...

s such as ''do'' have null allomorphs in tenseless

clause In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb wi ...

s such as ''Teddy not go''.

French

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

has many words ending in a "silent consonant", which is written but not pronounced before a pause or a word beginning with a consonant. It reappears in the case of liaison, e.g. between an article and a nominal syntagm, an epithet adjective and the noun, an adverb and the adjective it modifies, etc. If the following word begins with a vowel (or an "h muet"). Maybe the most common case is that of the articles "les, un, des, aux", etc.: e.g. "les hommes" ezɔm(the men) where the -s of the article is realized as vs. "les femmes" efam(the women) where it is silent.

German

Null allomorphy occurs a lot in the grammar of the

German language German ( ) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is als ...

. The

singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular homology * SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS) * Singular or sounder, a group of boar ...

form of the

dative case In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob ...

of masculine and neuter nouns such as ''der Mann'' (the man) has an optional grammatical suffix ''-e'': ''dem Mann-e''. However, this suffix is somewhat archaic today and is mainly used in written language. In other cases, its null allomorph occurs: ''dem Mann-∅''.

Dutch

To some extent, null allomorphs also occur in the

Dutch language Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. '' Afrikaan ...

. Many Dutch

compound word In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs wh ...

s have an interfix ''-s'' which is completely optional: both ''doodkist'' and ''doodskist'' ("coffin") are possible, as it is the case with ''spellingprobleem'' and ''spellingsprobleem'' ("spelling problem").
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References

Units of linguistic morphology Grammar {{ling-morph-stub

English

French

German

Dutch

See also

References