“Avital requirement for all scientific work is a set of terminology which is clear and unequivocal” (Dixon2010: 75). Here are some terms frequently used in the discussion of morphology as it applies to Arabic.17A more comprehensive glossary is found at the end of this book.
affix: “A letter or sound, or group of letters or sounds (= a morpheme), which is added to a word, and which changes the meaning or function of the word” (Richards and Schmidt2010: 17). This includes prefixes, circumfixes, infixes, and suffixes. Another definition states that “an affix is a grammatical element, belonging to a closed set, which can only function as a component of a word” (Cruse1986: 77).
allomorph: a variant of a morpheme that does not alter its basic identity or function, e.g., different forms for the English plural morpheme such as: books, dogs, houses, oxen, children, sheep; or the contextual var- iation of the indefinite article a/an that depends on the initial sound of the following word. In Arabic also, the plural morpheme takes on various shapes: sound feminine plural (-aat), sound masculine plural (-uuna/ -iina), and the many variations of broken or internal plurals. The laam of the definite article (al-) has a wide range of allomorphic shapes because of the fact that“sun letters” assimilate it, and change its realization (e.g., al-dhahab‘gold’ is pronounced adh-dhahab). bound morpheme: a grammatical formative that cannot occur on its
own as a word (e.g., in English word parts such as -ish, -ment, un-, -ly, - s, -ed). In Arabic, a lexical root (jidhr) such as {k-t-b} or {d-r-s}, a word pattern or template such as {ma__ __ a __ } for noun of place, or 48 Introduction to Arabic morphology
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case-markers such as -u, -i and -a). Arabic abounds in bound morphemes.
circumfix: a letter or sound, or group of letters or sounds which is added at both ends of a word (i.e., prefix and suffix together), and which changes the meaning or function of the word, as in the Arabic present tense structure ya-ktub-na‘they f. write.’
citation form: the basic word stem listed in a dictionary.
concatenative morphology: the formation of words through combina- tion of elements into a linear sequence.
derivational morphology: the creation of lexical items, word stems. discontinuous morphology: splitting one morpheme by insertion of
another unit, such as the interlocking of grammatical patterns and lexical roots in Arabic.
formative: any element entering into word formation, either derivational or inflectional.
free morpheme: can function independently as a word (e.g., Arabic min ‘from’).
infix: a letter or sound, or group of letters or sounds, which is added inside a word or morpheme, and which changes its meaning or function.
inflectional morphology: the study of word variation in context (e.g., number, gender, case, definiteness, tense, voice, and person are some categories of inflectional morphology). Inflections are applied to word stems.
lexeme: “A lexeme is a (potential or actual) decontextualized vocabulary word, a member of a major lexical category: noun (N), verb (V) or adjective/adverb (A)” (Aronoff1992b: 13). Another definition is “the abstract unit that stands for the common properties of all the forms of a word” (Booij 2005,2007: 316). Cruse refers to lexemes as“the items listed in the lexicon, or‘ideal dictionary,’ of a language” (1986: 49).18 Aronoff1994 states,“a lexeme, at least in its extrasyntactic state, is uninflected, both abstractly and concretely” (1994: 11).19
lexicon: essentially, the set of all words and idioms known to a native speaker of a language, including information on a word’s syntactic category (sometimes called“lexical category”), its grammatical func- tions and patterning, and its meaning/s.
morph: “A morph is a constituent element of a word-form. It is the realization of a morpheme (or sometimes more than one, see portman- teau morph)” (Bauer2003: 334).
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morpheme: a minimum unit of form having an independent lexical or grammatical meaning.“The morpheme is an abstract unit realized. . .by morphs, or. . . allomorphs” (Bauer2003: 334–335). Some theories of morphology crucially distinguish between lexical and grammatical morphemes (e.g., lexeme–morpheme base morphology).
morphology: the study of word structure and word formation, especially in terms of morphemes and morphological processes.
morphophonology: the study of the interaction/interface between mor- phology and phonology.
morphosyntax: the study of the interface between morphology and syntax.
non-concatenative morphology: “morphology that makes use of other processes than affixation or compounding to create new words or word forms” (Booij2007: 318). The root/pattern morphology of Arabic is an example of non-concatenative morphology because the root mor- phemes and the pattern morphemes are discontinuous and are com- bined through interlinking rather than linear affixation.
paradigm: “A set of forms, corresponding to some subset (defined in terms of a particular morphological category) of the grammatical words from a single lexeme. Paradigms are frequently presented in tabular form” (Bauer2003: 337). For example, in Arabic, the possible forms of a word can be listed in a table consisting of“cells” that constitute the range of word-form options possible in the language. For example, a triptote or fully inflectable (muʕrab) noun paradigm would look like this, showing both case and definiteness within six cells:
Word-stem; najm-‘tower’
Case Definite Indefinite
nominative najm-u najm-u-n
genitive najm-i najm-i-n
accusative najm-a najm-a-n
pattern (Arabic): a pattern is a bound and in many cases, discontinuous morpheme consisting of one or more vowels and slots for root pho- nemes (radicals), which either alone or in combination with one to three derivational affixes, interlocks with a root to form a stem, and which generally has grammatical meaning.20
portmanteau morph: incorporates two (or more) meanings in one mor- pheme, such as the dual suffix in Arabic:
-aani = number (dual) and case (nominative) -ayni = number (dual) and case (accusative/genitive) 50 Introduction to Arabic morphology
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prefix: a letter or sound, or group of letters or sounds which is added to the beginning of a word, and which changes the meaning or function of the word.
root (Arabic): a root is a relatively invariable discontinuous bound morpheme, represented by two tofive phonemes, typically three con- sonants in a certain order, which interlocks with a pattern to form a stem and which has lexical meaning. In this book, usually referred to as a“lexical root.” Aronoff defines a root in more vivid terms: “A root is what is left when all the morphological structure has been wrung out of a form. This is the sense of the term in Semitic grammar” (1992b: 15). stem or word stem: the base or bare form of a word without inflectional
affixes. A lexeme may have more than one stem.
stem allomorphy: the variation of a stem resulting from interaction with inflectional orderivational morphology.
suffix: a letter or sound, or group of letters or sounds which is added to the end of a word, and which changes the meaning or function of the word. WFR: word formation rule. A rule that applies in derivational
morphology.
Questions and discussion points
(1) Morphological analysis. Analyze the following Arabic words into their minimal morphological components by identifying the morphs (realiza- tions) of those categories. Separate the inflectional morphemes from derivational morphemes. How many do you come up with? Are there any that are difficult to identify?
(a) jaamiʕatun university
(b) sayuTaalibuuna they (m.) will demand (c) ilayhimaa to the two of them (d) muħaamiihinna their (f.) lawyers
(e) taʕaaluu come!
(f) naʕam yes
(g) mufiidun beneficial
(h) zilzaalun earthquake
(i) al-muxtabaru the laboratory (j) nataħaddathu we are speaking (k) tamtaddu it extends, spreads out (l) tastaʕdidna you (f. pl.) are preparing
(2) Arabic morphology is said to be essentially“non-concatenative.” However, it also has concatenative (linear) processes of affixation, especially in Morphological terminology 51
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inflectional systems (for example, the suffixation of sound plural mor- phemes, e.g., muhandis-uuna). What would be some other types of linear or concatenative morphology in Arabic?
(3) Discuss the concepts of derivational and inflectional morphology as they apply to Arabic. Are the boundaries between the two clear and distinctive, or do they ever blur? Does the Arabic termşarf cover both derivational and inflectional morphology? If you are unsure, find an Arabic definition of şarf and compare it to the concepts of derivational and inflectional morphology.
(4) Listfive free and five bound morphemes in Arabic.
(5) A“portmanteau” morph realizes more than one morpheme, as noted above. Make a list of four other examples of“portmanteau” morphs in Arabic. (6) In note 13, I quoted as follows:“In science, elegance aligns with preci-
sion, concision, and‘ingenious simplicity’: an elegant solution is the one that maps the most efficient route through complex terrain” (Sword2012: 165). Do you think that this definition of elegance applies in general, or just to sciences such as linguistics?
Further reading
Bauer, Laurie. 2003. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. (This book has an excellent glossary of technical terms in Appendix C.)
Booij, Geert. 2005, 2007. The Grammar of Words: An introduction to morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This book also includes a useful glossary of technical terms in morphology.)
McCarthy, John. 2008. Morphology. In Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, vol. III, ed. Kees Versteegh, 297–307. Leiden: Brill.
Ratcliffe, Robert. 2013. Morphology. In The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, ed. J. Owens, 71–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ryding, Karin C. 1993. Case/mood syncretism in Arabic grammatical theory: Evidence for the split morphology hypothesis and the continuum hypothesis. In Investigating Arabic: Linguistic, pedagogical and literary studies in honor of Ernest N. McCarus, Raji M. Rammuny, and Dilworth B. Parkinson, eds., 173–179. Columbus, OH: Greydon Press
Notes
1. A standard notational convention is to enclose morphemes in curly brackets { } (also called‘braces’). The slots in the pattern morpheme stand for the phonemes that constitute the lexical root.
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2. “A morpheme cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning” (Richards and Schmidt2010: 375).
3. “There are essentially three ways of thinking about morphology. One is to treat it as an autonomous‘module,’ some of whose primes and principles are entirely independent of other aspects of language (specifically, syntax, phonology, semantics or conceptual structure): morphology-by-itself. Another is to think of morphology as a ragbag of idiosyncratic phenomena. . . whose main interest for linguistics lies in the way it relates to‘genuinely’ linguistic levels of representation: morphology as merely a set of inter- face phenomena. The third tack is to admit that there are linguistically interesting phenomena in morphology (such as affix order or stem allomorphy), but to claim that these are reducible to principles of other models, e.g., syntax and phonology, respec- tively: reductionism (in the form of classical generative, SPE-type approach to allo- morphy, or to the more recent‘syntax-all-the-way-down’ approaches to morphosyntax). To a large extent, current ideology favors the second and/or third position” (Spencer 1994: 811–812). NB: The abbreviation “SPE” refers to The Sound Pattern of English, a landmark text in generative phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, originally published in 1968.
4. “To simplify the polar positions [thing or process], in the former case we view morphemes as Saussurian signs– each a meaning paired with an identifiable form, presumably worthy of a lexical entry; strategies of word-formation like reduplication, ablaut, truncation, and metathesis then require some explanation. In the latter case concatenative and nonconcatenative morphology alike are deemed processual; ordinary affixation, like reduplication, ablaut, etc., is treated as a process” (Lieber1996: 130). 5. “The distinction is delicate, and sometimes elusive, but nonetheless important”
(Aronoff1976: 2). Aronoff later notes:“Derivation and inflection are not kinds of morphology but rather uses of morphology: inflection is the morphological realization of syntax, while derivation is the morphological realization of lexeme formation” (Aronoff1994: 126).
6. See Ryding1993for an analysis of Arabic derivational and inflectional morphology. 7. “In a number of recent publications on morphology, attention has been drawn to the
autonomy of morphology in the sense that the formal expression of inflection and word formation is not always related to its content in a simple one-to-one fashion” (Booij 1996: 812).
8. Perlmutter’s “split morphology” hypothesis proposes that derivational morphology is much more tightly bound to the lexicon, or the lexical end of the spectrum, than is inflectional morphology, and that “only syntactically relevant morphology can be extralexical” (1988: 94).
9. Carstairs refers to“a kind of spectrum of morphological behavior with ‘derivational’ and‘inflexional’ extremes” (1987: 4). Baedecker and Caramazza argue that “inflec- tional and derivational processes or representations are distinguished in the‘cognitive lexicon’” (1989: 114).
10. Putting this another way, one scholar states that“there is some morphology (namely inflection) which is integrated with the syntax in a crucial way; while other aspects of morphology (derivation) are primarily tied up with meaning” (Anderson1988: 23). 11. See Dixon 2010: 226–227 for discussion and analysis of the terminology used in
classifying languages by morphological type.
12. Booij refers to these components as“atoms of words” (2005,2007: 27).
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13. Chomsky (1974: 3). In his 1974 work on modern Hebrew morphophonolgy, Chomsky emphasizes the concept of a“maximally simple grammar,” and states that “elegance” is a key factor in grammatical explanation, as well as simplicity (1974: 4). The following definition of elegance is a very apt one: “In science, elegance aligns with precision, concision, and‘ingenious simplicity’: an elegant solution is the one that maps the most efficient route through complex terrain” (Sword2012: 165).
14. Marked vs. unmarked features are components of“markedness theory,” which sees “certain linguistic elements . . . as unmarked, i.e., simple, core, or prototypical, while others are seen as marked, i.e., complex, peripheral, or exceptional” (Richards and Schmidt2010: 352). Typically, in Arabic, masculine gender in substantives is seen as “unmarked” or most basic, whereas feminine gender often carries an overt feminine- marking morpheme, and is considered“marked.” Essentially the same argument can be made for singular and plural number, singular being considered as the most basic, or “unmarked” category.
15. In this book I use the term“tense” rather than “aspect,” as I believe it is maximally informative for those readers new to linguistic analysis. In fact, tense and aspect seem to be interwoven in Arabic verbs. See Ryding (2005: 51–52).
16. Bound pronouns are considered clitics, words/morphemes that are bound to other words and do not stand on their own.“A simple clitic differs from other lexical items in lacking the prosodic status of ‘word:’ it has segmental, and possibly syllabic and even foot structure, but it is not a word” (Anderson1988: 24).
17. See Carstairs-McCarthy (2005) for a concise introduction to and explanation of mor- phological terminology.
18. Cruse makes a distinction between lexemes and“lexical units,” especially as these terms are used in lexical semantics (1986: 49–50).
19. Aronoff adds that “a lexeme is a (potential or actual) member of a major lexical category, having both form and meaning but being neither, and existing outside of any particular syntactic context” (1994: 11).
20. I am indebted to my mentor, Professor Wallace Erwin, for this definition. 54 Introduction to Arabic morphology
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