Morph and Allomorph

1.      Morph

Morph is the phonetic realization of a morpheme which study the unit of form, sounds and phonetic symbol. The morphs can be devided into two important classes, lexical and grammatical.

a.       Lexical morph is the morph that denote directly objects actions, qualities and other pieces of real word (ex : table, dog, walk, etc.)

b.      Grammatical morph is the morph that has been modifiying  the meaning of the lexical morphs by adding a certain element to them. (ex : un-, -able, re-, -d, in-, -ent, -ly, -al, -ize, -a-, -tion, anti-, dis-, -ment, -ari-, -an, -ism)

Example :

The word/morpheme disbelieve has a phonetic symbol /dIsbI’li:v/

Dis /dIs/                                       

Believe /bI’li:v/

So, every phonetic symbol of morpheme is called morph.

2. Allomorph

Allomorph is variant form of morpheme about the sounds and phonetic symbols but it doesn’t change the meaning. There are three types of allomorph, phonologically, morphologically and lexically conditioned allomorph.

1. Phonologically conditioned allomorph

The choice of allomorph is predictable on the basis of the pronounciation

• Allomorph of the indefinite article : an (before vowels, ex : an elephant) and a (before consonant, ex : a dog) both of them have meaning one,single.
• Allomorphs of the regular past tense morpheme

a.       /id/ after d,t : hated

b.      /t/ after all other voiceless sounds : picked

c.       /d/ after all other voiced sounds : wedged

• Some allomorph of the negative prefix in-

a.       /im/ before bilabial sounds : impossible

b.      /il/ before consonant /l/ : illegal

c.       /in/ elsewhere : independent

2. Morphologically conditioned allomorph

The choice of allomorph is determined by particular morphemes, not just by their pronounciation, ex : the morpheme –sume in changes to –sumpt- in (consume = consumption)

3. Lexically conditioned allomorph

The choice of allomorph is unpredictable, thus memorized on a word by word basis, ex : ox –plural- oxen, sheep-plural- sheep.

There are examples of allomorph.

Example :

1. Cats /s/

Dogs/z/

Boxes/iz/

2. Disagreement /dis/

Discount /dis/

Disbelieve /dis/

  

3. Loved /d/

Voiced /d/

Walked /t/

Stopped /t/

Kicked /t/

Note : allomorph occur at every morpheme, ex : agree (one morpheme, one allomorph
)

So, allomorph is variant form of a morpheme about the sounds and phonetic symbol but it doesn’t change the meaning. Allomorph has different in pronounciation and spelling according to their condition. It means that allomorph will have different sound, pronounciation or spelling in different condition.