Editing Morphophonology (section)

== Relation with phonology ==
{{Unsourced section|date=January 2024}}
Until the 1950s, many phonologists assumed that [[neutralization (linguistics)|neutralizing]] rules generally applied before [[allophone|allophonic]] rules. Thus phonological analysis was split into two parts: a morphophonological part, where neutralizing rules were developed to derive phonemes from morphophonemes; and a purely phonological part, where phones were derived from the phonemes. Since the 1960s (in particular with the work of the [[generative linguistics|generative]] school, such as Chomsky and Halle's ''[[The Sound Pattern of English]]'') many linguists have moved away from making such a split, instead regarding the surface phones as being derived from the underlying morphophonemes (which may be referred to using various terminology) through a single system of [[phonological rule|(morpho)phonological rules]].

The purpose of both phonemic and morphophonemic analysis is to produce simpler underlying descriptions for what appear on the surface to be complicated patterns. In purely phonemic analysis the data is just a set of words in a language, while for the purposes of morphophonemic analysis the words must be considered in grammatical [[inflection|paradigms]] to take account of the underlying [[morphemes]]. It is postulated that morphemes are recorded in the speaker's "[[lexicon]]" in an invariant (morphophonemic) form, which, in a given environment, is converted by rules into a surface form. The analyst attempts to present as completely as possible a system of underlying units (morphophonemes) and a series of rules that act on them, so as to produce surface forms consistent with the linguistic data.