Affixations and Allomorphs in Verbs and Nouns in a Research Abstract: A Morphemic and Morphophonemic Analysis

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can therefore be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.