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Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words. Morphophonological analysis often involves an attempt to give a series of formal rules that successfully predict the regular sound changes occurring in the morphemes of a given language. Such a series of rules converts a theoretical underlying representation into a surface form that is actually heard. The units of which the underlying representations of morphemes are composed are sometimes called morphophonemes. The surface form produced by the morphophonological rules may consist of phonemes (which are then subject to ordinary phonological rules to produce speech sounds or ''phones''), or else the morphophonological analysis may bypass the phoneme stage and produce the phones itself. ==Morphophonemes and morphophonological rules== When morphemes combine, they influence each other's sound structure (whether analyzed at a phonetic or phonemic level), resulting in different variant pronunciations for the same morpheme. Morphophonology attempts to analyze these processes. A language's morphophonological structure is generally described with a series of rules which, ideally, can predict every morphophonological alternation that takes place in the language. An example of a morphophonological alternation in English is provided by the plural morpheme, written as "-s" or "-es". Its pronunciation alternates between , , and , as in ''cats'', ''dogs'', and ''horses'' respectively. A purely phonological analysis would most likely assign to these three endings the phonemic representations , , . On a morphophonological level, however, they may all be considered to be forms of the underlying object , which is a morphophoneme. The different forms it takes are dependent on the segment at the end of the morpheme to which it attaches – these dependencies are described by morphophonological rules. (The behaviour of the English past tense ending "-ed" is similar – it can be pronounced , or , as in ''hoped'', ''bobbed'' and ''added''.) The plural suffix "-s" can also influence the form taken by the preceding morpheme, as in the case of the words ''leaf'' and ''knife'', which end with in the singular, but have in the plural (''leaves'', ''knives''). On a morphophonological level these morphemes may be analyzed as ending in a morphophoneme , which becomes voiced when a voiced consonant (in this case the of the plural ending) is attached to it. This rule may be written symbolically as: -> () / (). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pipes (| |) are often used to indicate a morphophonemic rather than phonemic representation. Another common convention is double slashes (// //), as above, implying that the transcription is 'more phonemic than simply phonemic'. Other conventions sometimes seen are double pipes (|| ||) and curly brackets (). For instance, the English word ''cats'' may be transcribed phonetically as , phonemically as and morphophonemically as , if the plural is argued to be underlyingly , assimilating to after a voiceless non-sibilant. The tilde ~ may indicate morphological alternation, as in for ''kneel~knelt'' (the plus sign '+' indicates a morpheme boundary).〔Collinge (2002) ''An Encyclopedia of Language'', §4.2.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Morphophonology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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