Definition

Noun: 1. (Linguistics) An abstract unit at a deeper level of analysis that underlies and accounts for the set of different phonemic shapes (allomorphs) that a single morpheme can take in different contexts. It represents the phonological essence of a morpheme before the application of morphological and phonological rules.

Usage

The term is used in technical linguistic analysis to describe the systematic phonological variation within morphemes. - The linguist posited a single morphophoneme to explain the vowel alternation in the plural morpheme (e.g., /s/, /z/, /ɪz/). - The analysis of "wife" to "wives" involves a morphophonemic change from /f/ to /v/.

Advanced Usage

• Morphophonemic Analysis: The process of identifying and representing these underlying units. A morphophoneme is often notated with capital letters or other diacritics to distinguish it from a surface phoneme (e.g., representing the alternating final consonant in "knife/knives" as /F/).
• Morphophonemic Rule: A rule that describes how an abstract morphophoneme is realized as a specific surface phoneme in a given environment.

Variants and Related Words

• Morphophonemic (adjective): Pertaining to morphophonemes or morphophonemics.
  • The morphophonemic rules of Old English are complex.
• Morphophonemics (noun): The study of the phonological representation and alternation of morphemes; the system of morphophonemes in a language.

Synonyms

• Underlying form (in some theoretical contexts)
• Phonological abstraction (descriptive synonym)

Related Concepts (Not Phrasal Verbs or Idioms)

• Allomorph: One of the variant phonetic forms of a morpheme (e.g., the /s/, /z/, and /ɪz/ sounds for the English plural morpheme are allomorphs).
• Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit in a language (e.g., "un-", "break", "-able").
• Phoneme: The smallest contrastive sound unit in a language that can change meaning (e.g., /p/ vs. /b/ in "pat" vs. "bat").

Noun

1. (linguistics) the phonemes (or strings of phonemes) that constitute the various allomorphs of a morpheme