The Reality of Morphophonemes

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.