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This article is about a lingustic term. See Pseudomorph for another meaning of the word.

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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.

Contents 1 Allomorphy in English 2 Allomorphy in Case Distinctions 3 History 4 See also 5 References

English has several morphemes that vary in sound but not in meaning. Examples include the past tense and the plural morphemes.

Example In the English language the past tense morpheme is -ed. It occurs in several allomorphs depending on its phonological environment, assimilating voicing of the previous segment or inserting a schwa when following an alveolar stop:

• as /əd/ in verbs that end with /t/ or /d/, such as 'hunted' [hʌntəd] or 'banded,'[bændəd]
• as /d/ in verbs that end with voiced phonemes, such as 'buzzed', [bʌzd]
• as /t/ in verbs that end with voiceless phonemes, such as 'fished' [fɪʃt]

Allomorphy can also exist in case distinctions, as in Classic Sanskrit:

Vāk (voice)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	/vaːk/	/vaːʧ-as/
Genitive	/vaːʧ-as/	/vaːʧ-aːm/
Instrumental	/vaːʧ-aː/	/vaːg-bʱis/
Locative	/vaːʧ-i/	/vaːk-ʂi/

The nominative /vaːk/ is the basic form of the morpheme and, because of Pre-Indic palatalazation of velars and the merging of /e/ and /o/ into /a/ (making the alternation unpredictable on phonetic grounds), morphophonemic variation has occurred that isn’t directly related to phonological processes.

The term was originally used to describe variations in chemical structure. It was first applied to language (in writing) in 1948, by E.A. Nida in Language XXIV. ^[1]

• Alternation (linguistics)
• Consonant mutation
• Grassmann's Law
• Allophone

• Jeffers, Robert J. and Lehiste, Ilse (1979). Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics. MIT press.