morfologialle

Morfologialle is a theoretical term in linguistics used to describe the set of alternative realizations of a morphological unit within a speech community, conceived as analogous to alleles in genetics. The idea treats morpheme realizations as discrete variants whose frequencies can vary across dialects or populations and change over time.

Etymology: the term combines morfologia (morphology) with allele, signaling the analogy between morphs and genetic variants. It is mainly used in theoretical discussions and is not yet a standard category in most grammars.

Definition and scope: a morfologialle denotes one realizational form of a given morphological feature, such as a plural suffix realization or a case ending. The collection of variants for that feature in a population is called its morfologialle pool. Frequencies are analyzed with population-language methods, drawing on inspired notions from population genetics, such as drift, migration, and selection-like pressures linked to communicative efficiency.

Applications: the concept provides a framework for modeling diachronic change and dialect contact, enabling researchers to track how rare realizations persist or spread, and how contact networks shape the distribution of morfologialle variants. It can be used in corpus studies, fieldwork, and computational modeling.

Examples: English plural allomorphs pronounced [s], [z], and [ɪz] can be viewed as morfologialle variants of the same grammatical feature; similar ideas can be applied to case endings, gender markers, or tense endings.

Criticism: since linguistic inheritance differs from genetic inheritance, some scholars argue the analogy is metaphorical and may obscure more than it clarifies.