Morphemes do not necessarily exist as free word whereas word is always free standing. It is merely a sound unit. It must be emphasized that many morphemes in English have only one phonemic form, that is, one allomorph – for example, the morpheme ( boy ) and ( hood ) each has one allomorph - /bɔy/ and /-hUd/ - as in boyhood. Difference between morpheme and phoneme is very important in linguistics. A phoneme, on the other hand, is the smallest unit of speech. Constituent structure of morphemes The constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a hierarchical structure. Allomorph definition, any of two or more different forms of the same chemical compound. Another difference is that they may or may not be semantic. As nouns the difference between allophones and allomorphs is that allophones is while allomorphs is . Allomorphs A morpheme is a unit of sound.

Just as an allophone is a variation of a single phoneme, an allomorph is a variety of a single morpheme. A lexeme is like a headword in that dictionary. See more. The relationship between a morpheme and allomorphs: When a morpheme is represented by a segment, that segment is a morph. First, inflectional morphemes never change the grammatical category (part of speech) of a word. Differences between Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes There are some differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes.

The allomorphs of a morpheme are derived from phonological rules and any morphophonemic rules that may apply to that morpheme. For example, tall and taller are both adjectives.

But, a morpheme can never comprise of any words inside it. The significant difference between the two is that while a morpheme carries a meaning a phoneme does not. The plural morphemes in English, usually written as {s}, has at least three allomorphs: {s} as in „hats‟ [‘hæts] {z} as in „dogs‟ [‘dɒgz] {ɪz} as in „boxes‟ [‘bɒksɪz] All allomorphs with the same set of features forms a morpheme. The following box illustrates: A word may have one or more than one morphemes.

The basic different between the types of morphemes and a word is the freestanding property. Examples of Allomorphs: 1. The word jump is a lexeme, for instance. An allomorph is a morph that has a unique set of grammatical or lexical features. If a morpheme can be represented by more than one morph, the morphs are allomorphs .

The idea is that we each have a mental lexicon, a bit like a dictionary in our heads, that stores all the words we know. A morpheme, then, is a set of allomorphs that have the same set of features. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language.

In some sense it corresponds to a word-form.