An allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme.

The
concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound (phonologically)
without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension
of variations in sound for a specific morpheme.

Allomorphy in English suffixes

English has several morphemes that vary in sound but not in meaning. Examples include the
past tense and the plural morphemes.
For example, in English, a past tense morpheme is -ed. It occurs in several allomorphs
depending on its phonological environment, assimilating voicing of the previous segment or
inserting a schwa when following an alveolar stop:

as /d/ or /d/ in verbs whose stem ends with the alveolar stops /t/ or /d/, such as
'hunted' /hntd/ or 'banded' /bndd/

as /t/ in verbs whose stem ends with voiceless phonemes other than /t/, such as
'fished' /ft/

as /d/ in verbs whose stem ends voiced phonemes other than /d/, such as 'buzzed'
/bzd/

Notice the "other than" restrictions above. This is a common fact about allomorphy: if the
allomorphy conditions are ordered from most restrictive (in this case, after an alveolar stop)
to least restrictive, then the first matching case usually "wins". Thus, the above conditions
could be re-written as follows:

as /d/ or /d/ when the stem ends with the alveolar stops /t/ or /d/

as /t/ when the stem ends with voiceless phonemes

as /d/ elsewhere

The fact that the /t/ allomorph does not appear after stem-final /t/, despite the fact that the
latter is voiceless, is then explained by the fact that /d/ appears in that environment,
together with the fact that the environments are ordered. Likewise, the fact that the /d/
allomorph does not appear after stem-final /d/ is because the earlier clause for the /d/
allomorph takes priority; and the fact that the /d/ allomorph does not appear after stem-final
voiceless phonemes is because the preceding clause for the /t/ takes priority.
Irregular past tense forms, such as "broke" or "was/ were", can be seen as still more specific
cases (since they are confined to certain lexical items, like the verb "break"), which therefore
take priority over the general cases listed above.

[edit] Stem allomorphy

Allomorphy can also exist in stems or roots, as in Classical Sanskrit:

Nominative
Genitive
Instrumental
Locative

Vk (voice)
Singular
/vak/
/vatt-as/
/vatt-a/
/vatt-i/

Plural
/vatt-as/
/vatt-am/
/va-bis/
/vak-i/

There are three allomorphs of the stem: /vak/, /vatt/ and /va/. The allomorphs are
conditioned by the particular case-marking suffixes.
The form of the stem /vak/, found in the nominative singular and locative plural, is the
etymological form of the morpheme. Pre-Indic palatalization of velars resulted in the variant
form /vatt/, which was initially phonologically conditioned. This conditioning can still be
seen in the Locative Singular form, where the /tt/ is followed by the high front vowel /i/.
But subsequent merging of /e/ and /o/ into /a/ made the alternation unpredictable on
phonetic grounds in the Genitive case (both Singular and Plural), as well as the Nominative
Plural and Instrumental Singular. Hence, this allomorphy was no longer directly relatable to
phonological processes.
Phonological conditioning also accounts for the /va/ form found in the Instrumental
Plural, where the // assimilates in voicing to the following /b/.

inflectional morpheme: this morpheme can only be a suffix. The s in cats is an

inflectional morpheme. An inflectional morpheme creates a change in the function of
the word. Example: the d in invited indicates past tense. English has only seven
inflectional morphemes: -s (plural) and -s (possessive) are noun inflections; -s ( 3rdperson singular), -ed ( past tense), -en (past participle), and -ing ( present participle)

are verb inflections; -er (comparative) and -est (superlative) are adjective and adverb
inflections.
Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on,
without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the
"dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes
"dogs"). They carry grammatical information.

Inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes that alter the grammatical state of the root or
stem. They do not carry any meaning on their own, as is the nature of bound morphemes, but
serve a critical function in inflected languages such as English. (It should be noted, however,
that English is more of an analytic language, one that depends more heavily on sentence
structure than conjugations and declensions.)
These bound morphemes express such concepts as tense, number, gender, case, aspect, and so
on. In other words, they are grammatical markers. Unlike derivational morphemes they do
not change the syntactic category of a word. A verb remains a verb no matter the inflectional
morpheme, and a noun a noun. Additionally, they cannot be joined to incomplete morphemes.
For example, you can add the derivational bound morpheme "atic" to "unsystem" to get
"unsystematic." You cannot, however, add a possessive marker to make "unsystem's."
English used to be highly inflected and had a very rich variety of inflectional morphemes.
Now, however, there are only eight left. They are:
-s
-ed
-ing
-en
-s
-'s
-er
-est

third person singular present

past tense
progressive
past participle
plural
possessive
comparative
superlative

She waits at home.

She waited at home.
She is waiting at home.
She has eaten the donut.
She ate the donuts.
Lisa's hair is short.
Lisa has shorter hair than Mary.
Lisa has the shortest hair.

Inflectional morphemes typically follow deriviational morphemes in the hierarchy of

morpheme structure. IE, they occur last, at the end of the morpheme, not before any
derivational morphemes. It is, for example, "unlikelyhoods" for more than one unlikelyhood,
not something like "unlikelyshood."
Some words do not take the regular inflectional morphemes; they are irregular, or, more
technically, suppletive. The past tense of "buy" is not "buyed," but "bought." This is an
irregularity that is simply memorized.
The examples were taken from An Introduction to Language, Sixth Ed. by Victoria Fromkin
and Robert Rodman.