Cranberry morphemes & allomorphs PDF

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Summary

Introduction to English Linguistics - kleine Mitschrift zum Thema Morphemes...

Description

What are cranberry morphemes? What are allomorphs?

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A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit

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A word can consist of one morpheme or of more than one

A Cranberry Morpheme is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning or a grammatical function but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other. A cranberry morpheme is a morpheme that only appears in one word, and whose meaning by itself is unclear or unknown to the everyday speaker. Examples:  mit in permit, commit, and submit  ceive in receive, perceive, and conceive  twi in twilight First of, they occur only as bound roots and secondly, they have no constant meaning attached to them

An allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments.

For example, the plural in English has three different morphs, making plural an allomorph, because there are alternatives. Not all plurals are formed in the same way; they're made in English with three different morphs: /s/, /z/, and [əz], as in kicks, cats, and sizes, respectively. Examples: The plural morpheme in English, usually written as '-s', has at least three allomorphs:   

[-s] as in [hQts] 'hats' [-z] as in [d&u0254;gz] 'dogs' [«z] as in [bŒks«z] 'boxes...