The Reality of Morphophonemes

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Date

1968

Journal Title

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Publisher

Linguistic Society of America

Abstract

The importance of the morphophoneme as a structural unit has not been fully recognized. Post-Bloomfieldians explicitly rejected this unit and methods of description making use of it. This paper contends that morphophonemes are indeed required for the most efficient description of morpheme alternants. It is further argued that morphophonemes are real phonological units and not simply abstractional fictions. These points are illustrated by a problem in Tera, a Chadic language of northern Nigeria. In order to account for word-final vowel alternations, some /i/'s must be interpreted as the morphophoneme ǀƏǀ others as |i|. Surprisingly, allophones of preceding consonants are variably determined by these underlying morphophonemes.

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Keywords

Linguistics, African Languages, Tera, Chadic

Citation

Newman, Paul. 1968. The Reality of Morphophonemes. Language 44: 507-515.

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Except where otherwise noted, this content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license includes the following terms: You are free to share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Type

Article