What is its role in word formation? ... templates as structuring objects at the interface between phonology, morphology and syntax. In Berber, I have ... MIT Press.
Mohamed Lahrouchi – Research program
Roots, structures and representations in Berber and Arabic
Research interests (keywords): phonology, morphology, interface, templatic morphology, government phonology, psycholinguistics, Berber, Semitic. Recent work in linguistic theory has revived interest in the traditional debate on roots and their role in word formation. Several scholars have challenged the various attempts to define this object: what is a root made of? What is its role in word formation? In Indo-European languages, the root is roughly considered to be the smallest meaningful lexical unit that a set of items share. This lexical unit is assumed to contain both consonants and vowels. In contrast, in the overwhelming majority of Afroasiatic languages, including Semitic and Berber, semantically-related words are described as sharing a common root that consists entirely of consonants, combined with other morphological units (i.e. vowels and templates). In Arabic, for instance, kataba ‘he wrote’, kitaab ‘book’, maktab ‘office’ and kaatib ‘writer’ share the root {k,t,b}. Likewise, in Berber, krz ‘plough’, ikrz ‘he ploughed’, amkraz ‘ploughman’, and tayrza ‘ploughing’ share the root {k,r,z}. This view has been largely supported by research in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics (cf. among others McCarthy 1979, 1981, 1991, Prunet et al. 2000, Frost et al. 2000, Davis & Zawaydeh 2001, and Idrissi et al. 2008). Alternative theories, couched for the most part within the Optimality Theoretic framework, reject the consonantal root and instead suggest that words are derived from other whole words (see among others Hammond 1988, Ratcliffe 1997, Ussishkin 1999, Benmamoun 1999, and Dell & Elmedlaoui 1992, 2002). My research in the past few years has focused on this issue, in connection with templates as structuring objects at the interface between phonology, morphology and syntax. In Berber, I have argued for the existence of the root as an abstract unit of morphological analysis (cf. Lahrouchi 2008, 2009, 2010). The purpose of the present project is twofold. First, it aims to provide supporting evidence for the root as an abstract unit of morphological analysis. Second, it explores the place and the role of the root in accounting for certain phonological processes, in light of recent works at the interface between phonology and syntax (see Marvin 2002, Marantz 2001, 2007, Pigott & Newell 2006, Samuels 2010 and Scheer 2011, among others). Within a phasal
(cyclic) approach to derivation, the root along with its category-defining heads will be argued to form the domain of application of various phonological processes including epenthesis, spreading and harmony. Traditional phonological opacity and sandhi phenomena will be analysed at the interface between phonology and morphosyntax. In Berber for instance, standard phonological approaches fail to explain how glide-high vowel alternation (u/w) occurs in words like gru ‘pick up!’ / agraw ‘assembly’ but not in gru-j-as ‘pick to him’ where the vowel u remains unchanged. Assuming that glides typically appear in the immediate vicinity of a vowel, in complementary distribution with the corresponding high vowels, hence the forms agraw / gru, how is the dative form grujas ‘pick to him’ derived? Followed by a vowel-initial morpheme –as, the final U should normally surface as a glide, leading to the form *grwas. Instead, a glide j is inserted between the vowels u and a in order to avoid hiatus. Another facet of this project focuses on the structure of templates. I seek to determine how and when templates, as fully-fledged morphemes, interact with roots. Templates commonly refer to sequences of consonantal and vocalic positions ordered in a fixed way and designed to convey specific grammatical information. Templatic morphology goes back to McCarthy’s seminal work (1979) on verb conjugation in Arabic, which argues within the framework of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1990) that the various forms of the verb are naturally obtained through the association of a consonantal root with vocalic melodies and affixes to specific templates. For instance, the forms kataba ‘he wrote’, kattaba ‘he made write’ and kaataba ‘he corresponded’ are derived from the association of the root {k,t,b} and the vowel melody {a} to the templates CVCVCV, CVCCVCV and CVVCVCV, respectively. In order to reduce the number of templates proposed by McCarthy, Guerssel & Lowenstamm (1990) and Lowenstamm (2003) suggest that the verbal forms in Arabic are derived by means of a single template of the form CVCVCVCVCV, in which the syllables in bold indicate derivational sites. In order to account for the co-occurrence restrictions that certain grammatical markers show in Berber and Arabic, I will argue that templates can mediate the interaction between components of Grammar. Handled in syntactic structure, they allow us to unify standard phonological, morphological and syntactic analyses. I have shown recently that the incompatibility of reflexive n- with intensive gemination in Arabic verbs such as kassara ‘he shuttered’ will be shown to follow from the fact that both markers compete for the same templatic position. Though semantically viable, *nkassara is ruled out because reflexive n-, generated earlier in the structure than intensive gemination, fills the only derivational C
position provided by the template. The project also includes psycholinguistic study of roots in Berber. The aim is to test the psychological reality of consonantal roots and their role in the mental lexicon. In line with recent studies on Semitic (see Deutsch, Frost & Forster 1998 on Hebrew, Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson 2001 on Arabic, Ussishkin et al. 2010 on Maltese), we plan to conduct auditory priming experiments in order to determine whether the consonantal root yields any morphological priming effect. References Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2001). Morphological units in the Arabic mental lexicon. Cognition 81 : 65-92. Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, edited by Michael Kenstowicz, 1-52. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Davis, Stuart; Zawaydeh, Bushra. 2001. Arabic hypocoristics and the status of the consonantal root. Linguistic Inquiry 32: 512–520. Dell, François, and Mohamed Elmedlaoui. 1992. Quantitative transfer in the nonconcatenative morphology of Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages 3: 89-125. Deutsch, Avital, Frost, Ram, & Forster, Keneth (1998). Verbs and nouns are organized and accessed differently in the mental lexicon: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 24 : 1238-1255. Goldsmith, John. 1990. Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Basil: Blackwell. Guerssel, Mohand & Jean Lowenstamm. 1990. The derivational morphology of the Classical Arabic verbal system. Manuscript, UQAM and Université Paris 7. Hammond, Michael. 1988. Templatic transfer in Arabic broken plurals. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6: 247-270. Lahrouchi, Mohamed. 2010. On the internal structure of Tashlhiyt Berber triconsonantal roots. Linguistic Inquiry 41/2: 255-285. Lahrouchi, Mohamed & Philippe Ségéral. 2010. Peripheral vowels in Tashlhiyt Berber are phonologically long: Evidence from Tagnawt, a secret language used by women. Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 2: 202-212. Lowenstamm, Jean. 2003. A propos des gabarits. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 32: 7-30. Marvin, Tatiana. 2002. Topics in the Stress and Syntax of Words. Ph.D dissertation, MIT. McCarthy, John. 1979. Formal problems in Semitic phonology and morphology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 4: 2, ed. Alexis Dimitriadis et.al., 201-225. Marantz, Alec. 2007. Phases and Words. In Phases in the Theory of Grammar, edited by Sook-Hee Choe, 191-222. Seoul: Dong In. McCarthy, John. 1981. A prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology. Linguistic Inquiry 12: 373-418.
McCarthy, John. 1991. L'infixation réduplicative dans les langages secrets. Langages 101: 1129. Piggott, Glyne & Heather Newell. 2006. Syllabification and the Spell-Out of Phases in Ojibwa Words. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 20.2: 39-64. Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory, Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Manuscript, Rutgers University and Johns Hopkins University. Prunet, Jean-François. 2006. External evidence and the Semitic root. Morphology 16: 41-67. Prunet, Jean-François, Renée Béland, and Ali Idrissi. 2000. The mental representation of Semitic words. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 609-648. Ratcliffe, Robert. 1997. Prosodic templates in a word-based morphological analysis of Arabic. In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics X, ed. by Mushira Eid and Robert Ratcliffe, 147171. Amsterdam/philadelhia: John Benjamins. Samuels, Bridget. 2010. Phonological Derivation by Phase: Evidence from Basque. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 166-175. Scheer, Tobias. 2011. A Guide to Morphosyntax – Phonology Interface Theories. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ussishkin, Adam. 1999. The inadequacy of the consonantal root: Modern Hebrew denominal verbs and output-output correspondence. Phonology 16: 401-442. Ussishkin, Adam, Andew Wendel, Kevin Schluter & Colin Dawson. 2010. Supraliminal and subliminal root and binyan priming in Maltese. Old World Conference in Phonology, Marrakech.
