hello everyone welcome thanks for tuning in in this video I will talk about the difference between a morpheme and an ala morph now before you go any further if you have not already done so please do check out part 1 and morphology and that's necessary to understand the information I discuss in this video information including what a morpheme is in the first place how to determine the number of morphemes present in a given word as well as how to differentiate between types of morphemes okay so assuming that you are clear on the concept of a morpheme and how to identify them in a word let's talk about this relationship between a morpheme and an alumn morph incidentally the relationship between a morpheme and an ala morph is analogous to the relationship between a phoneme and an allophone so even though that has to do with phonology I would encourage you to check out that video called phonemes and allophones that I have on my channel because it'll give you a better understanding of not just the relationship between a phoneme and an allophone but you'll see how the relationship between those two concepts are similar to the relationship between a morpheme and an alumn or so in part 1 of morphology I talked about how a morpheme is the smallest element of meaning in a language they cannot be broken down into any smaller meaningful bits just individual sounds which in and of themselves are meaningless so let me add to that definition by saying that a morpheme is an abstract mental representation of a minimal element of meaning so this will mean then that an alumn morph is one of several phonetic realizations of a morpheme now all of those definitions aside those are probably not very helpful let me try to illustrate the difference between a morpheme and an alumn morph using a few examples so first let's take the plural morpheme in English which I am indicating here in capital letters to signify that it is a morpheme it is a mental abstract representation of the category of plurality in English but there's more than one way to articulate or to actually pronounce a morphing the plural morpheme so let's talk about four for the sake of simplicity so we have as in cats we have as in dogs and we have us as in horses and lastly we have the zero morph now there are others but let's just stick with these four for now so going back to that first example the S at the end of cats as we write it just disregard how it's written concentrate on what you actually hear and what you produce when you say the word so when you say cats you'll notice that that final sound is written with an S in the international phonetic alphabet so there's good reason why that specific alla morph will appear in this environment specifically because cat ends with which is a voiceless sound so by virtue of a phonological process called assimilation which means one sound becoming more like its neighboring sound cat attending in that voiceless sound will require a voiceless sound to come after it cats and if you just think about as either a native speaker or a fluent speaker it is a lot more economical to say cats than it is cats or something like that so this is why we get at the end of a word like cat but if we take a word like dog well this gets a different ala morph for the plural so instead of we get dogs dogs and that happens because dog ends with goo which is a voiced sound therefore because of assimilation requiring we get another voiced sound to come after it dogs and we can take another a third a l'amour for the plural marker which is us like in a word such as horses so because horse ends in the sound we have to rely on this third strategy here of inserting a vowel and then providing a zoo so people don't say hey look at those pretty horses right nobody says that so you have to say horses so we've got like in cats as in dogs and as as in horses but there is also a fourth or what we call zero morph alum or for the plural and this is unpredictable this happens with some words here and there in English in which the form for the singular and the plural is the same such words include sheep which is the same one sheep or two sheep you still say the same thing or moose one moose twenty moose you're still saying the same word so all four of those whether it's us or zero they are all ways to indicate the plural morpheme they are all phonetic realizations of the plural morpheme now let's take another example instead of talking about the plural morpheme let's talk about the past tense morpheme which I have written here in capital letters to indicate again it is a mental abstract representation when we speak we are not speaking in morphemes we have to phonetically realize them as ala morphs and there is more than one way to phonetically realize the past tense morpheme in English so let's take a few so for example we could have duh as in the word called now call ends in ol which is a voiced sound and again by virtue of assimilation it requires that the sound coming after it to denote the plural is also voiced so that's why we get duh making an appearance here because it's a voiced sound called now we could take another word that ends say in a voiceless sound such as pass like they passed the class notice that it ends in a the phonetic symbol for that as a T but it's written with an e D disregard how words are written concentrate on what you're actually hearing and producing as a speaker so past requires a different a second ala morph for the past tense morpheme and again it's because we have a word that ends in a voiceless sound pass so we have to use a voiceless sound to go after it that's one of the rules that we have in English now we could take yet another words as want which ends in a stop sound and here again because it ends in a stop sound we have to use yet another alle morph and this is where we would say hood so we have a third alle morph and this only makes an appearance when it's being attached to a word that ends in a stop whether it's voiced or voiceless so here we've already got three alle morphs for the past tense morpheme in English we have we have and we have so these are determined based on the kind of sounds that are present in the word that we're attaching that plural suffix to so it's it's predictable for the most part there are some terms that get zero morph so we could also talk about a zero morph in the past tense like the word put is the same in the present as it is in the past or cut is the same in the present tense as it is in the past tense and those are pretty unpredictable but they're kind of sparse they're just here and there in English but for the most part it's very predictable when you will use one alle morph say versus another alum or or it now let's take one more example to illustrate this difference between a morpheme and an alumn morph and this time instead of talking about a category like plurality or tense let's take an actual prefix let's take the in prefix which you can attach to a whole bunch of words in English to indicate that it means not so if we take a word like inability it means not having the ability right so we could imagine this relationship in the same way I'm putting up in as this prefix in capital letters to sort of suggest it's a mental abstract category it only exists in our minds but there are a number of ways to phonetically realize that morpheme in English and we'll talk about 3ala morphs specifically so one I've just said is in and that could appear especially when a word starts with a vowel like in the word ability you know then we get our garden-variety in making and an entrance here but if we take a word like complete and we put the in prefix before it then we get incomplete so it's important to stop here and mention that if you are a native speaker of English or a fluent speaker of English you will likely pronounce this word differently than somebody who is just learning English and that's okay but this is where ala morphs make an appearance the more fluent you are in a language the more you learn where to use the right ala more for the right elephone this is sort of what makes up sociolinguistic variation and how we can tell what dialect a speaker uses is based in part on what alle morphs they are using what allophones they're using as well so again if we take a word like complete and we add that prefix in right next to it well when speakers say that in English it more sounds like this incomplete rather than incomplete so this means we've got an appearance of our velar nasal which is written here and this is what it looks like in the international phonetic alphabet so we've already got a second alla morph for this morpheme of the in prefix and let's take one more alle morph which is a very different one so if we take the word input it's spelled inpu T of course but disregard how a word is spelled and instead concentrate on what you are saying so many speakers will actually pronounce this especially in casual pronunciation as input and the whole reason why that's happening is because you're articulate errs in your vocal tract are getting ready to produce the put in input and that sound the quality of that sound bleeds into the previous sound so instead of getting in as an input it sounds more like an M a bilabial nasal input so we have three different ala morphs and just as with the previous cases they are determined through assimilation one sound becoming more like its neighboring sound so this is what I mean when I say that an ala morph is a phonetic realization of a morpheme there are many ways to pronounce a word and it really just depends on the sounds that are present in that word and what prefix or suffix you are adding on to the end of it because it might modify the the pronunciation of the word itself okay so that in a nutshell is the difference between a morpheme and an alumn morph I hope that you found this useful and again if you have not already done so please do check out part 1 on morphology if you've made it this far I don't know if this will make any sense so please do check out those videos in the mean time and when I put it up please check out part 3 for morphological analysis just giving you some guidance on how to work through a morphological analysis problem and how you can determine just what is a morpheme in another language that you don't even speak thanks so much take care