A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§2 Basic concepts in inflectional morphology 267

suffixes ·s and ·es for the same purpose in different contexts is called an alternation.

The two shapes are called aiternants, and the rules of inflectional morphology need

to specify the conditions under which one alternant or the other is required.

(e) The priority of speech

So far in this book we haven't had to talk much about how words or sentences are

pronounced. We've just shown them in written form. But when we deal with the

internal structure of words, we have to pay some attention to speech, for at least two

reasons.

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In the first place, there are alternations in speech that don't show up in writing.

The plural suffixes in cats and dogs, for example, are written the same way but

they sound different. Try saying this aloud: Let the cats in. The last part sounds

like sin. Now say: Let the dogs in. The last part sounds like zin. That difference

is never shown in English spelling.

Secondly, and more importantly for our purposes, the choice between alternants

in writing often depends on features of the pronunciation. Consider these two

plural nouns:

LEXEME

stomach

ii coach

SINGULAR

st omach

coach

PLURAL

st omach·s

coach·es

The reason why we have the ·s alternant in stomachs but ·es in coaches can't be
explained by looking at the spelling of the lexical base: both bases end in ch (with
a before that). Rather, the alternation reflects the fact that in speech the suffix in
stomachs is simply a consonant sound, whereas in coaches it is made up of a vowel
sound plus a consonant sound. And in speech the reason we select the vowel-plus­
consonant alternant spelled as ·es has to do with the phonetic properties of the lex­
ical base. This suffix is added to a lexical base that ends in a sibilant, a 'hissing
sound' like the sounds at the ends of bases like kiss, quiz, bush, rouge, bench,
judge.
Despite the frequent relevance of pr onunciation, we don't attempt a full descrip­
tion of inflection in spoken English here. There are several reasons for focusing on
writing in a short introductory book like this.

One is that writing is much more uniform than speech. There are extensive dif­

ferences in pronunciation between British English and American English, and

between these and other regional varieties, whereas differences in spelling are

few in number, small in scale, and easy to describe in full.

A second reason is that the writing system has the advantage of familiarity.

Examples in written English can just be shown in their usual written form,

whereas exhibiting spoken forms would call for a phonetic alphabet. There is an

International Phonetic Alphabet which would serve this purpose, but although it

is being used in an increasing number of dictionaries, not everyone knows it, and

it would take some space to explain.