A morphophonemic representation shows grammatical units of L1.

Grammatical properties are not possessed, and syntactic relations are not contracted, by elements of the utterance, but by grammatical units. These are word forms and formatives in their capacity as units of grammar (rather than phonetic or orthographic units). They belong to a more abstract level, which differs from the phonetic or orthographic level in the following respects:

  1. The distinction between free and bound forms obeys grammatical criteria and may, therefore, differ from phonetic or orthographic boundness. Here are two examples:

    .CaesarCiceroque
    LatinCaesarCicero=que
     Caesar.M(NOM.SG)Cicero.M(NOM.SG)=and
    Caesar and Cicero

    In , Ciceroque is one prosodic and orthographic word. For grammatical analysis, however, que must be treated as a grammatical word, since it bears the same (coordinating) syntactic relation to Caesar and to Cicero.

    .zumBeispiel
    Germanzu=mBeispiel
     to=DEF.M.SG.DATexample
    for example

    In the German , zum is one phonetic and orthographic word. For grammatical analysis, however, it is decomposed into the grammatical words zu and dem (or 'm), since the preposition zu governs the entire NP (de)m Beispiel.
    Likewise, the primary transcription may contain an expression like don't (and even much less standard forms); but at the level of grammatical words, this will be represented by do not.

  2. Two orthographic words may correspond to one grammatical word. This case is rather frequent with proper names like Santa Claus. It may also apply to a compound like word form, which is spelt as two orthographic words, but may be one grammatical word.
  3. An analysis of the grammatical structure of a sentence may require positing zero elements. Such elements do have grammatical properties, but obviously no counterpart in the phonetic or orthographic representation.
  4. Elements of the primary representation that are of no relevance to the structure of the sentence may have no counterpart at the level of grammatical units. This concerns non-linguistic noises (hmhm, uh …), false starts and the like.