Morphophonemics

This module presents an introduction to English morphophonemics. Sound structure (phonology) and word structure (morphology) are two of the main components of a language system. However, many a times, these systems interact and affect each other in some interesting ways and give rise to a phenomenon which is known as ‘morphophonemics’ Sometimes, due to this interaction, pronunciation of a morpheme may get modified or completely changed. These changes may be regular or irregular and usually are context sensitive in nature. In ‘morphophonemics’, we specifically study the changes which occur at the margins/boundaries of morphemes. There are many glossaries, lectures, notes and other reference materials available over the internet for further studies in this area. Some of the pioneer reference works are also listed in the reference section.

This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can, therefore, be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.

This is a report of quantitative study on the development of listening score of the first semester students of English Department. The data are the students' score of four tasks: task 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. The data reveal that there 7 students who could consistently improve, secondly consistently up and down improved as 22 students. It can be said that 22 students and the scores of other 22 students are up and down. It could be because of some problems such as having trouble of sounds, not knowing all the words, no understanding fast speech, such as natural native speech, no being able to keep up the native utterance, getting tired after joining other activities. In the context of teaching and learning English in Indonesia, teaching the comprehension of spoken language in the target language (English) is of primary importance if the communication aim is to be achieved. A frequently neglected area, listening comprehension has its peculiar problems which arise from the fleeting, immaterial nature of spoken utterances and the complicated ways one processes what he or she hears. Sounds English and Indonesian), accent, vocabulary (collocation, idiomatic expression etc), syntactical pattern become their problems in listening activities. Most of them always complain about the sounds and many of students say that the sounds are not clear. The Indonesian accent is very clear. It means that the alphabets and the pronunciation are the same, but in English the alphabet or the words and the pronunciation are different. That's why it causes misinterpretation among the students. The next is vocabulary, it relates to the lack of collocation, idiomatic expression change one's mind means "decide to do something different from what had been decided earlier", drop someone a line means "send a letter or email to someone" Example: It was good to meet you and I hope we can see each other again. Drop me a line when you have time. Figure something out means "come to understand a problem". Many students are lazy to note down the new vocabulary. It is also added that the utterances are spoken too fast. The accent of native speaker is heard ambiguity; because some pronunciation likes rhotic and non rhotic speakers such as assimilation for example that boy heard thap boy, juncture, elision, and contraction. Relating to that matter, the first semester students of English Department as learners in this case join in listening 1 are required to do some practices to

A phonological model, which integrates the study of phonological structure with a competence system of cognitive operations, offers a principled account of a crux in phonological theory. The preference for a concrete rather than an abstract phonological solution for the case of k/Ø alternations in Modern Standard Turkish is seen to result from a requirement that underlying representations be retrievable, i.e. retraceable on the basis of phonological rules in close conjunction with precisely circumscribed and formalizable cognitive operations.

The realization that morphophonemic changes known from living languages were operative in Sumerian as well has important implications for understanding the phonology and morphology of this dead language.  In light of comparative evidence it is likely, for instance, that the 2nd person agent/object marker of Sumerian, appearing in Late Sumerian as /e/ and in earlier texts as a long vowel, actually is the same pronominal element [s] that was realized as /r/ in the dative infix of the verb and as /z/ in the personal and possessive pronoun.
There are other cases of morphophonemic change in the nominal and verbal inflexion of Sumerian, which are briefly discussed and interpreted phonologically in the light of comparative linguistic evidence, and their relevance for the understanding of Sumerian phonology and grammar is tentatively outlined.

This document is one of 17 volumes on indigenous Mexican languages and is the result of a project undertaken by the Archivo de Lenguas Indigenes de Mexico. This volume contains information on Acatec, an indigenous language of Mexico spoken along Mexico's southern border. The objective of collecting such a representative sampling of the linguistic richness of the region was to store it for typological and historic comparisons. To gather data, questionnaires designed to elicit responses that would reveal the linguistics, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the language were administered to the indigenous people of the area. This work is the first systematic attempt to create source material of such magnitude. Basic information has been collected that is directly useful and will serve as a departure point for detailed study. Each volume deals with the phonology, morphophonemics, grammar, and vocabulary of the language. Literature is included with Spanish translations, as is actual dialogue. Numerous sentences are analyzed. Contains three references. (CK)

On the basis of data relating to the two Swedish sibilants [ɧ] and [ç], this paper raises a number of objections to the high degree of abstractness advocated by Classical Generative Phonology and promulgated in applications of that theory to Swedish. The evidence includes distinctiveness, free variation, lexical frequency, distribution, morphophonemic alternations, irregular allomorphs, and hosts of generatively underdetermined underlying forms. The evidence shows that the two Swedish sibilants must be considered phonemes in their own right and that a concrete type of description of the whole data set is preferable.

This document is one of 17 volumes on indigenous Mexican languages and is the result of a project undertaken by the Archivo de Lenguas Indigenas de Mexico. This volume contains information on Totonac, an indigenous language of Mexico spoken in Papantla, Veracruz. The objective of collecting such a representative sampling of the linguistic richness of the region was to store it for typological and historic comparisons. To gather data, questionnaires designed to elicit responses that would reveal the linguistics, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the language were administered to the indigenous people of the area. This work is the first systematic attempt to create source material of such magnitude. Basic information has been collected that is directly useful and will serve as a departure point for detailed study. Each volume deals with the phonology, morphophonemics, grammar, and vocabulary of the language. Literature is included with Spanish translations, as is actual dialogue. Numerous sentences are analyzed. (CK)

Number is one of a small set of basic conceptual categories with relatively clear grammatical reflections and requirements. It must be called upon during fluent language production to create agreement between subjects and verbs, and the questions addressed in this paper concern how that is done. The number information that is used may be notional (whether the referent of the subject noun phrase is single or multiple), or lexical (whether the subcategorised number of the head of the subject noun phrase is singular or plural), or even morphophonological (whether the head of the subject noun phrase has the phonological features associated with plural inflections). Different views about language processes make contrasting predictions about the likelihood of contributions from each of these sources during normal speaking. In a series of experiments employing an agreement-error elicitation task, we examined the effects of variations in notional, lexical and morphophonological features on the implementation of agreement. The results suggest that verb agreement is dominated by lexical number.

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological analogies to existing past tenses stored in memory. On the other side of the debate are rule-based or dual-route approaches which agree that phonological analogy is important for producing irregular past tenses (e.g., think→thought), but argue that regular past tenses (e.g., walk→walked) are generated via a +ed rule and that a principled account of regular inflection can only be given by recourse to explicit rules. This debate has become a crucial battleground for arguments concerning the necessity and importance of abstract mental rules, embracing not only language processing, but also the of nature cognition itself. However, in centering on the roles of phonological similarity and rules, the past tense debate has largely ignored the possible role of semantics in determining inflection. This paper presents five studies that demonstrate a striking and decisive role of semantic similarity in inflection. In fact, semantic factors appear to be more important in inflection than the grammatical considerations put forward by the dual-route account. Further, these new findings provide a new way of discriminating between the claims of single-route (similarity-based) and dual-route (rule-based) approaches. It appears that inflection is carried out through analogical reminding based on semantic and phonological similarity and that a rule-based route is not necessary to account for past tense inflection.

The realization that morphophonemic changes known from living languages were operative in Sumerian as well has important implications for understanding the phonology and morphology of this dead language. In light of comparative evidence it is likely, for instance, that the 2nd person agent/object marker of Sumerian, appearing in Late Sumerian as /e/ and in earlier texts as a long vowel, actually is the same pronominal element [s] that was realized as /r/ in the dative infix of the verb and as /z/ in the personal and possessive pronoun. There are other cases of morphophonemic change in the nominal and verbal inflexion of Sumerian, which are briefly discussed and interpreted phonologically in the light of comparative linguistic evidence, and their relevance for the understanding of Sumerian phonology and grammar is tentatively outlined.

This paper focuses on tonal alternations in the Urhobo noun phrase. Urhobo is an Edoid language spoken extensively in Delta State, Nigeria. The language has two basic tones, high and low, plus a phenomenon of downstep, both automatic and non-automatic. The noun phrases examined include the noun + noun associative construction, the noun + relative clause construction, and noun reduplication, which is used to express the equivalent of the English noun phrases that signal "every + noun" and "only/so many/so much + noun." This paper is a purely descriptive study intended to present facts that would lead in the long run to a better understanding of tonal alternations in Edoid languages. Theoretical analysis would be done only when necessary. (Author/SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) his document has been reproduced as ceived from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy.

Oromo, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia and Kenya, is a language characterized by particularly complex morphophonology. It provides extremely interesting data for linguistic research on the nature of long vowels and geminate consonants, because long sequences are very common and have a high functional load. The focus of this study is to provide a systematic description and analysis of long sequences, with particular reference to the grammatical functioning of the length parameter. The findings prove that there is a length morphological unit that is phonologically interpreted as a copying process, it can also be asserted that the language treats vowel and consonant length in a systematic way. The analysis supports the autosegmental interpretation of long segments as single units in the quality tier and as two units in the quantity tier. However, some data contradict the universal and obligatory nature of this representation in identical segments belonging to different morphemes, because distinctions between many-to-one and one-to-one associations are necessary to account for the facts of particular languages. This dissertation works within the theory of phonological weight, because it permits the autosegmental expression of significant differences between the segments according to their initial and final quantity as well as to the way in which the quality tier associates with the quantity tier.

Les As. presentent et discutent une analyse phonemique des voyelles et consonnes du meitei (ou meiteilon), la langue de Manipur. Il s'agit d'une des langues les plus importantes du groupe kuki-chin, de la branche assam-birmane, de la famille tibeto-birmane. Quelques processus phonologiques importants sont egalement discutes

The aim of the present study was to determine whether processing of syntactic word information (lemma) is subserved by the same neural substrate as processing of conceptual or word form information (lexeme). We measured BOLD responses in 14 native speakers of German in three different decision tasks, each focussing specifically on one level of lexical processing (conceptual, syntactic, and morpho-phonological). The test parameters were natural gender, grammatical gender, and word form derivation, respectively. Discrimination between words played backwards and complex sounds served as control task. Complex contrasts revealed a functional fractionation of the left inferior frontal gyrus for each level of lexical processing.

In a very thorough paper, Kean (1977) recently has presented a linguistic model which, she claims, explains all the features of the syndrome of Broca's aphasia, especially their agrammatism. The basic assumption of this model is that at the phonological level, a sentence is described as a string of phonological and non-phonological "words". A phonological word is defined as "the string of segments, marked by boundaries, which function in the assignment of stress to a word (in English)" (p. 22). More specifically, it is "the domain over which the assignment of stress takes place" (p. 24). As an example, Kean gives the word d&finite. In the compound definitive, d&finite is not a phonological word. The domain of stress assignment is the whole compound definitive,