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.

Keywords: morphophonemics, affixations, allomorphs, voicing assimilation, dissimilation