Table of Contents
1. What is Allomorph?
Answer: Allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. It is a variant form of a morpheme that has the same basic meaning, but is pronounced or spelled differently.
2. How many types of allomorphs are there?
Answer: There are three types of allomorphs: free, bound, and clitic.
3. What is a free allomorph?
Answer: A free allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that is not attached to any other word and can stand alone as an independent word. For example, the word “run” is a free allomorph of the morpheme “run”.
4. What is a bound allomorph?
Answer: A bound allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that is attached to another word or phrase. For example, the word “running” is a bound allomorph of the morpheme “run”.
5. What is a clitic allomorph?
Answer: A clitic allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that is attached to another word or phrase in a specific way. For example, the word “runs” is a clitic allomorph of the morpheme “run”.
6. What is an inflectional allomorph?
Answer: An inflectional allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that is used to indicate changes in tense, number, gender, person, or case. For example, the verb “go” has the allomorphs “goes” (third person singular present tense), “went” (past tense), and “gone” (past participle).
7. What is a suppletive allomorph?
Answer: A suppletive allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme that is completely unrelated to the other allomorphs of the same morpheme. For example, the word “am” is a suppletive allomorph of the verb “be”, which has other allomorphs such as “is” and “are”.
8. How do allomorphs help to create meaning in language?
Answer: Allomorphs help to create meaning in language by providing different ways of expressing the same meaning. For example, the verb “run” can be expressed as “runs”, “ran”, and “running”, which all convey the same basic meaning but with different nuances.
9. How do allomorphs affect pronunciation?
Answer: Allomorphs can affect pronunciation by changing the sound of a word. For example, the verb “run” can be pronounced differently as “runs”, “ran”, and “running”.
10. How can allomorphs be used to create new words?
Answer: Allomorphs can be used to create new words by combining different allomorphs of the same morpheme to create a new word. For example, the allomorphs “run”, “ran”, and “running” can be combined to create the new word “runner”.