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The Reality of Morphophonemes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Paul Newman
Paul Newman*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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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 abstractions 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 |ə|, others as |i|. Surprisingly, allophones of preceding consonants are variably determined by these underlying morphophonemes.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 507 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by Linguistic Society of America

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