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use in grammar of Chomsky

In linguistics: Modifications in Chomsky’s grammar
…Prague school linguists labelled “archiphonemes,” being unspecified for any feature that is contextually redundant or predictable. For instance, the first segment of the phonological representation of “man” will not include the feature [+ voice]; because nasal consonants are always phonetically voiced in this position in English, the feature [+…
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morpheme

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morpheme

linguistics

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 1, 2025 • Article History

Related Topics:: morphology; word; formant; morphon

On the Web:: Mustansiriyah University - Morphology (PDF) (May 01, 2025)

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morpheme, in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like “place” or “an,” or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in “reappeared.” So-called isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -s, indicating plural in “cats,” “dogs,” the -es in “dishes,” and the -en of “oxen” are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme. The word “talked” is represented by two morphemes, “talk” and the past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included in morphology (q.v.).

archiphoneme

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use in grammar of Chomsky

morpheme