Allomorph

An Allomorph is a basic linguistic unit of meaning in a linguistic expression mention.

• Context:
  • It is associated with a Morpheme.
  • It can be described by a 3-Tuple of (Surface Form, Grammatical Category, Morpheme).
  • It can be the Output of an Allomorph Segmentation Task.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • ("wolf”, {SN, SR}, Wolf_1), as in “We saw a [wolf].”
  • ("wolv”, {PN, SR}, Wolf_1), as in “We saw [wolv]es.”
  • “the”, as in “We (Adv nevertheless] continued.”
  • “not”, as in “We went (Adv notwithstanding].”
  • ?? “not”, as in “We went (PP, notwithstanding] the warning.”
  • ?? “not”, as in "I was [not] at the event."
  • ?? “the”, as in "I was not at (DT the] event.".
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “wolves”, a Terminal Word.
  • “footballer's”, is a Terminal Word.
  • (FOOT+BALL+ER/Noun), is a Lexeme.
  • “PSEUDO-”, is a Bound Morpheme.
• See: Morphological Parsing Task, Word Stem.

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References

2009

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=allomorph
  • S: (n) allomorph (any of several different crystalline forms of the same chemical compound) "calcium carbonate occurs in the allomorphs calcite and aragonite"
  • S: (n) allomorph (a variant phonological representation of a morpheme) "the final sounds of `bets' and `beds' and `horses' and `oxen' are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme"
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph
  • An allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound (phonologically) without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension of variations in sound for a specific morpheme.
• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/allomorph#Noun
  • allomorph (plural allomorphs)
    • 1. (chemistry) Any of the different crystalline forms of a substance.
    • 2. (linguistics) Any of the different phonological representations of a morpheme.
• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morph#Noun
  • morph (plural morphs)
    • 1. (linguistics) An allomorph: one of a set of realizations that a morpheme can have in different contexts.
    • 2. (biology) Local variety of a species, distinguishable from other populations of the species by morphology or behaviour.

2001

• (Hausser, 2001) ⇒ Roland Hausser. (2001). “Foundations of Computational Linguistics: Human-Computer Communication in Natural Language, 2nd edition. Springer.
  • QUOTE: Just as sentences are composed of word forms rather than words, words forms are composed of allomorphs rather than morphemes. By analogy to the definition of a words, a morpheme is defined as the name of the set of associated allomorphs.

    Like words forms, allomorphs are formally analyzed as ordered triples, consisting of the surface, the category, and the semantic representation.

1998

• (Carter, 1998) ⇒ Ronald Carter. (1998). “Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives; 2nd edition." Routledge.
  • QUOTE: Two observations can me made immediately. First, morphemes convey semantico-syntactic information. Secondly, there are two classes of morphemes: morphemes which occur independently as words and are co-terminous with specific word-forms, and morphemes which occur only as part of a word and which could not stand on their own. The first class, which are called free morphemes, would include cat, distinguish, laugh. The second class, which are called bound morphemes, would include un, s, ed, able, anti, and ism. We should note, however, that some morphemes can have the same form but still be different morphemes, for example, the 's' in cats, cats and laughs or the 'er' in smaller, winner, eraser. These variants are usually termed allomorphs. We should also recognize that like the term lexeme, morpheme is an abstraction. To be strict, morphemes do not actually occur in words. Morphemes are realized by forms which are called morphs.

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