Asktutor Query:
Name: Jan
Country and Region: Trinidad and Tobago, UWI, St. Augustine
Native Language: English
Student or Teacher: Student
Age or Grade: undergraduate 1st. year
Subject of Question: Morphology
Give a well-illustrated explanation of why
variants of a morpheme may
sometimes be described as phonologically
conditioned. How does
phonologically conditioned variation
differ from other forms of variation?
Please note that I only
wish some direction as to what/where to start.
Thank you
Hi Jan,
I am writing on behalf of Ask a Linguistics Tutor
in response to your question on Morphology. To gain an insight into
morphophonemics, first consider the following set of data:
List 1: intolerant, intractable, indefeasible,
indefinite
List 2: impossible, impoverished,
imbalance
In both lists, we unilaterally find a
prefix meaning 'not', but we find it with two different phonetic realizations,
namely, [In-] and [Im-]. We might ask, then,
are we dealing with two separate, but
synonymous, prefixes? Most likely
not. For one, the two prefixes occur in a highly restricted
distribution. We cannot say 'imdefinite' or, conversely,
'inpoverished'. This situation contrasts with lexical synonymy, in which
the relevant lexical items are distributed much more fluidly. Consider the
(near) synonyms 'pretty,' 'beautiful,' and 'attractive'. Now take the
sentence 'The ______ girl dropped her ice-cream cone'. We can insert
any of the three words in the blank without a large shift in meaning, or, for
that matter, semantic well-formedness.
Second, notice that the two prefixes
sound remarkably similar, differing only by one feature of articulation,
namely, place of articulation. [Im-] is articulated at the lips, while
[In-] is pronounced slightly farther back at the alveolar ridge.
Notably, this articulation schema holds for the segments immediately following
the prefix. Every instance of an [In] prefix is followed by a sound
that is articulated at the alveolar ridge, while every instance of
an [Im] prefix in our list is immediately followed by a
sound produced at the lips. This scenario represents a textbook
case of regressive ASSIMILATION, which is a co-articulatory process
whereby features of one sound can 'bleed' onto features of another
near-by sound. In this case, the place-of-articulation feature on the
stop is anticipated by and adapted onto the nasal in the prefix.
Now that we've seen that [Im-] and [In-] are
contextually related, the burning question now becomes: which of the two forms
is the lexical realization of 'not' and which of the two forms is the
surface/conditioned realization? To find out, we simply adopt an Ockhamist
stance and assume that the form whose distribution is more difficult to motivate
(i.e. whose derivation would require all sorts of disjoint and/or crazy phonetic
rules) is the underlying one. So, hunting more diverse contexts in which
to place the 'not' prefix, we get the following:
List 3: ineffable, inanimate, inoperable, invalid,
infidelity
Crucially, after front and back
vowels, high and low vowels, and after labiodental fricatives, we find the
alveolar prefix [In-]. Thus, it's a good bet that [In-] is the
lexical/underlying form of the prefix meaning 'not', while
[Im-] is derived solely from a
lexical item's
contextual factors.
Now, to answer the second part of your query, that
is, why phonetic variation need not be conditioned, take the word 'aunt,'
meaning the sister of one's mother or father. I pronounce the word as
(approximately rendered) [awnt], that is, rhyming with 'daunt' or the vowel in
'launch'. Most other native speakers of American English, however,
pronounce the word as [aent], that is, identically to the word 'ant' and rhyming
with 'can't' and 'plant'. The pronunciation difference isn't due to
contextual factors, given that I can say 'I like my [awnt]' just as much as my
neighbor can say 'I like my [aent]'. Rather, it is simply due to dialect
differences. Many people in the state of Virginia say [awnt], and my Mom,
born and raised as a Virginian, is one of them. Hence, I picked up
the trait from her speech, even though I was raised in Tennessee and even though
I attend school in Michigan, both of which are places where people typically say
[aent].
This variation is aptly called 'FREE
VARIATION'. As you can tell, the origins of any one variant can be rather
difficult to trace and can often be ascribed only to a matter of personal
history or preference.
I hope this helps!
Sincerely,
sarah goodman
University of
Michigan