ALLOMORPH

This article is about a lingustic term. See Pseudomorph for another meaning of the word.

In linguistics an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. The meaning remains the same, while the sound can vary.

For example, in the English language the past tense morpheme is -ed. It occurs in several allomorphs depending on its phonological environment, assimilating voicing of the previous segment or inserting a schwa when following an alveolar stop:

• as /əd/ in 'hunted' or 'banded',
• as /d/ in 'buzzed',
• as /t/ in 'fished'

Allomorphy can also exist in case distinctions, as in Classic Sanskrit:

The nominative /vaːk/ is the basic form of the morpheme and, because of Pre-Indic palatalazation of velars and the merging of /e/ and /o/ into /a/ (making the alternation unpredictable on phonetic grounds), morphophonemic variation has occurred that isn’t directly related to phonological processes.

See also

• Consonant mutation
• Grassmann's Law

Reference

• Jeffers, Robert J. and Lehiste, Ilse (1979). Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics. MIT press.

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