Variant

变体

A term used in linguistics to refer to a linguistic form which is one of a set of alternatives in a given context. The concept is fundamental to the notion of allo- (-phone, -morph, etc), as illustrated by the variant forms of the past-tense morpheme (/-t/, /-d/, /-ɪd/, etc.). The choice of variants may be subject to contextual constraints (conditioned variants), or there may be no stateable conditions - the cases of free variants.

语言学用来指一个语言形式是在一给定上下文中一组交替形式中的一个。这个概念是构成“-变体”这类术语的基础（如音位变体，语素变体等），例如过去时语素的各变体形式（/-t/，/d/，/ɪd/等）。变体的选择可能受上下文制约，即条件变体，也可以没有可说明的条件，即自由变体。