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English also has another morpheme that is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g. small → smaller). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning ...
Hence different forms of a morpheme (minimum meaningful unit of language) are often spelt identically or similarly in spite of differences in their pronunciation. That is often for historical reasons; the morphophonemic spelling reflects a previous pronunciation from before historical sound changes that caused the variation in pronunciation of ...
Under the generative grammar theory of linguistics, if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed, for example) would reveal which phoneme the flap represents, once it is known which morpheme is being used. [17]
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
An example of a morphophonological alternation in English is provided by the plural morpheme, written as "-s" or "-es". Its pronunciation varies among [s], [z], and [ɪz], as in cats, dogs, and horses respectively. A purely phonological analysis would most likely assign to these three endings the phonemic representations /s/, /z/, /ɪz/.
The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The plural morpheme for regular nouns in English is typically realized by adding an -s or -es to the end of the noun. However, the plural morpheme actually has three different allomorphs: [-s], [-z], and [-əz]. The specific pronunciation that a plural morpheme takes on is determined by the following morphological rules: [2]
The plural morpheme in English is a sibilant suffixed to the end of most nouns. Regular English plurals fall into three classes, depending upon the sound that ends the singular form: Regular English plurals fall into three classes, depending upon the sound that ends the singular form: