Arabic-L:LING:Verb Morphology Query

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 02 Aug 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Verb Morphology Query

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1)
Date: 02 Aug 1999
From: Samira Farwaneh <sfarwaneh at juno.com>
Subject: Verb Morphology Query

Dear members,

Salaam and hope this heat wave will be over soon. I have some questions
concerning the inflection of perfective verbs in spoken Arabic. As
everyone knows, the inflection of weak and biliteral (geminate) verbs in
many dialects sometimes contain a long stressed mid vowel /ee/ as in
[raddeet] 'I answered', or [rameet] 'I threw', etc. My interest is not in
the diachronic analysis of this vowel, but rather in the presence or
absence of this vowel in different verb class paradigms. We do not find
this vowel in the inflection of strong verbs, for example, only katabt is
attested, and not *katabeet. Similarly, the vowel is absent in hollow
verb paradigms, we find zurt and not *zaareet.

I have presented a paper on this issue but I still have questions, the
answer to which may verify or falsify my analysis. Is it true that forms
like katabeet and zaareet are never attested? I seem to have a vague
recollection of my mother saying something like shaba9eeti? 'are you
full?' when talking to my younger sisters, but I do not have documented
data to corroborate this. So if you know or heard of such forms, please
answer the following questions:

1. In what linguistic domain do those forms appear, e.g., child language,
motherese language disorder, dialectal variation, language games, etc.
2. Do the forms appear randomly or regularly?
3. Is the appearance of the forms governed by any variable such as
gender, age, education, etc?
4. Do you know of any references on the topic?

Many thanks in advance for any info, suggestions, or discussion.

Samira Farwaneh
Dept of Linguistics
University of Utah

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End of Arabic-L: 02 Aug 1999