Underlying representation

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Underlying representation

In morphophonology

Morphophonology

Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies:*The phonology structure of morpheme.*The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined...
, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a morpheme

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
is the abstract form the morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rule

Phonological rule

A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic sound change in spoken language. Phonological rules are commonly used in phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when Language production or Language comprehension spoken language....
s have applied to it. The underlying representation of a morpheme is considered to be invariable across related forms (except in cases of suppletion

Suppletion

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflection form of another word when the two words are not cognate....
), despite alternation

Alternation (linguistics)

In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonology realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant....
s among various allophone

Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
s on the surface.

In many cases, the underlying form is simply the phonemic

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
form.

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In morphophonology

Morphophonology

Morpheme

Phonological rule

Suppletion

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflection form of another word when the two words are not cognate....
), despite alternation

Alternation (linguistics)

Allophone

Phoneme

American English

PhonologyIn many ways, compared to English language in England, North American English is conservative in its phonology. Some distinctive accents can be found on the East Coast of the United States , partly because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of English English at a time when those varieties we...
the phoneme in a word like wet can surface either as a glottalized

Glottalization

Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and voiced consonants is most often realized as creaky voice ....
or as a flap

Flap consonant

In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another....
, depending on environment: wet vs. wetter. In both cases, however, the underlying representation of the morpheme wet is the same: its phonemic form .

In other cases, phonological rules may change the phonemes involved. In such cases, pipes ("|") or double slashes may be used in transcription to distinguish the underlying form from its phonemic realization. An example is the word cats, which has the phonemic representation . If we take the underlying form of the English plural suffix to a 'z

Z is the twenty-sixth and final Letter of the modern English alphabet....
' sound, as many phonologists do, then the underlying form would be . This discrepancy cannot be avoided by choosing a different underlying form of the plural: If we assume it is an 's

S is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ess or generally es- when part of a compound word, plural esses....
' sound, as it's spelled, then the word dogs, phonemically , would have the underlying form . As this example illustrates, the underlying form of a morpheme is a theoretical construct, and depends on the analysis that is used.

Sandhi

Sandhi

Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonology processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words....
, such as the tone sandhi

Tone sandhi

Tone sandhi is the change of tonal language that occurs in some languages when different tones come together in a word or phrase. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining"....
of the Chinese languages, is another phonological process that changes the phonemes of a morpheme from its underlying form.