In morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

-based morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, a null allomorph or zero allomorph is a special kind of allomorph

Allomorph

In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes....

 which has the form of a null morpheme

Null morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a null morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by a phonologically null affix . In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It is also called a zero morpheme; the process of adding a null morpheme is called null affixation, null derivation or zero...

. Because there are contexts in which the underlying

Underlying representation

In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology, the underlying representation or underlying form of a word or morpheme is the abstract form the word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it. If more rules apply to the same form, they can apply...

 morpheme still appears in the surface structure, a "real" null morpheme could be re-defined as a morpheme which never occurs in the surface representation of words. The phenomenon itself is known as null allomorphy or total morpheme blocking.

English

An example of null allomorphy in English is the phrase two fish-Ø which can also be two fish-es. In addition, the forms of many auxiliary verbs such as do may have null allomorphs, especially in children's language.

German

Null allomorphy occurs a lot in the grammar of the German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

. The singular

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

 form of the dative case

Dative case

The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....

 of masculine and neuter nouns such as der Mann (the man) has an optional grammatical suffix -e: dem Mann-e. However, this suffix is somewhat archaic today and is mainly used in written language. In other cases, its null allomorph occurs: dem Mann-Ø.

Dutch

Null allomorphs also occur in the Dutch language

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, be it to a lesser degree than in German. That is, many Dutch compound words have an interfix

Interfix

Interfix is a term in linguistics and more specifically, morphology . It describes an affix which is placed in between two other morphemes and does not have a semantic meaning...

-s, the use of which is completely optional: Dutch people both say doodkist and doodskist ("coffin"), and both spellingprobleem and spellingsprobleem ("spelling problem").