MORPHOSYNTAX

1. MORPHEME

Definition
Morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning.

1. Types of morphemes

• Free morphemes, is morpheme which can appear with other lexemes (i.e Town+Hall= Town Hall) or they can stand alone (i.e Town).
• Bound morphemes is morpheme which appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme (i.e un-, im-, -ly, etc). Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as “cranberry” morphemes, from the “cran” in that very word.
• Derivational morphemes is morpheme which can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of “-ness” to “happy,” for example, to give “happiness.” They carry semantic information.
• Inflectional morphemes is morpheme which modify a word’s tense, number, aspect, and so on, without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the “dog” morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme “-s” becomes “dogs”). They carry grammatical information.
• Allomorph is variants of a morpheme, e.g., the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as /-z/, /-s/ or /-ɨz/.

Example of Morpheme: The word “unbreakable” has three morphemes: ü  “un-“, a bound morpheme;
ü  “break“, a free morpheme; and
ü  “-able“, a bound morpheme.
(“un-” is also a prefix, “-able” is a suffix. Both “un-” and “-able” are affixes.)
ü  The morpheme plural -s has the morph “-s“, /s/, in cats (/kæts/), but “-es“, /ɨz/, in dishes (/dɪʃɨz/), and even the voiced “-s”, /z/, in dogs (/dɒɡz/). “-s”. These are allomorphs.


2. PHONEME

Definition
Phoneme is one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language). In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.
Thus a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question.

1. Types of Phoneme

1. Restricted phonemes

A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:

• /ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Swahili or Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).
• /h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic, or Romanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).
• In many American dialects with the cot-caught merger, /ɔ/ occurs only before /r/, /l/, and in the diphthong /ɔɪ/.
• In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
• Under most interpretations, /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either /bɔɪ/ or /bɔj/.

2. Biuniqueness

Biuniqueness is a property of the phoneme in classic structuralist phonemics. The biuniqueness definition states that every phonetic allophone must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, there is a many-to-one allophone-to-phoneme mapping instead of a many-to-many mapping.
The unworkable aspects of the concept soon become apparent if you consider the phenomenon of flapping in North American English. In the right environment, this flapping can change either /t/ or /d/ into the allophone [ɾ] for many affected speakers. Here, one allophone is clearly assigned to two phonemes.

3. Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don’t contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized.
In English there are three nasal phonemes, /m, n, ŋ/, as shown by the minimal triplet,

/sʌm/	sum
/sʌn/	sun
/sʌŋ/	sung

With rare exceptions, these phonemes are not contrastive before plosives such as /p, t, k/ within the same morpheme. Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link, only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the /m, n, ŋ/ distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives /p, t, k/:

• Only /m/ occurs before /p/,
• only /n/ before /t/, and
• only /ŋ/ before /k/.

Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If we hypothesize that we are dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ over the other two.
(In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as [m, n, ŋ] in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.)
In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of /m, n, ŋ/ before /p, t, k/ could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, {m, n, ŋ}, or |n*|.
Another example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives /t, d/ following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as [ɾ], a voiced alveolar flap. This can be heard by comparing betting with bedding.

[bɛt]	bet
[bɛd]	bed

with the suffix -ing:

[ˈbɛɾɪŋ]	betting
[ˈbɛɾɪŋ]	bedding

Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant in either word is /t/ or /d/ without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of betting or bedding could be |ˈbɛDɪŋ|.
Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification.
Underspecification: phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the articulatory features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.

phoneme/ archiphoneme	height	backness	roundedness
/i/	high	front	unrounded
/ɯ/	high	back	unrounded
/u/	high	back	rounded
|U|	high

Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an /ɯ/; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can been seen in the following words:

-|Um|			‘my’	(the vowel of this suffix is underspecified)
|idikUm|	→	[idikim]	‘my boot’	(/i/ is front & unrounded)
|xarUm|	→	[xarɯm]	‘my snow’	(/a/ is back & unrounded)
|nomUm|	→	[nomum]	‘my book’	(/o/ is back & rounded)

Examples of phonemes in the English language include consonant plosives like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. These phonemes, however, might not be so apparent in written English, for example when they are typically represented by a group of more than one letter, called a digraph, like <sh> (pronounced /ʃ/) or <ch> (pronounced /tʃ/).
Two sounds which are allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in /pɪn/, and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/ is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction between [r] and [l] in Japanese: there is only one /r/ phoneme, though it has various allophones that can sound more like [l], [ɾ], or [r] to English speakers. The sounds [z] and [s] are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in some variants of Spanish like ‘andaluz’. The sounds [n] (as in run) and [ŋ] (as in rung) are also sometimes considered phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish.
An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration of a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Australian, vowels).

Source: erwin1988zone.wordpress.com