ARABIC-L: LING: Arabic plural morphology response

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 11 Jan 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Paper
2) Subject: Sources

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1)
Date: 11 Jan 1999
From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" <ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Subject: Paper

I wrote a paper on just this topic a long time ago when I was still a
graduate student: Ratcliffe, R. 1990. "Arabic Broken Plurals: Arguments
for a Two-fold Classification of Morphology" Perspectives on Arabic
Linguistics II.ed. Mushira Eid and John McCarthy, 94-119. John
Benjamins.

Later when I was researching my dissertation (The Broken Plural Problem
In Arabic, Semitic and Afroasiatic, Yale 1992)  I remember noting that
someone surprisingly early in the literature had made the comment that
the broken plural was a derivational and not an inflectional category.
I just made a cursory search for the reference but now I can't find it.

The conclusion I draw from points like those you mention is that
inflection and derivation are accidental (as opposed to universal)
categories.  It happens that in some (European) languages, formal,
semantic, syntactic, and other properties of morphemes or morphological
processes tend to converge in a certain way, but in other languages the
convergence doesn't occur in the same way. This is one of the issues
that has caused me to lose faith in the generative approach.
Generativists take a handful of received ideas about language drawn from
traditional grammar, classical logic, Saussure, etc. and elevate them to
the status of universals.  Then rather than revise the revise the
proposed universals when the data doesn't fit they try to explain away
the problematic data using underlying processes, abstract forms, etc.. I
think a typological and statistical approach to an issue like this would
be more likely to be fruitful: Which properties always converge, which
properties frequently, which rarely, and why.

By the way I have a book on the broken plural just coming out from
Benjamins. (It's been announced, though I haven't seen it yet): The
‘Broken’ Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic: Allomorphy
and Analogy in Non-Concatenative Morphology.

Best Wishes,

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan

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2)
Date: 11 Jan 1999
From: George Kiraz <gkiraz at research.bell-labs.com>
Subject: Sources


I don't know if these works answer your specific questions, but they are on
broken plural "derivation":

M. Hammond, "Templatic Transfer in Arabic Broken Plurals", _Natural Language
and Linguistic Theory_ 6: 247-270, 1988.

J. McCarthy and A. Prince, "Foot and word in prosodic morphology: the Arabic
broken plural". _Natural Language and Linguistic Theory_ 8: 209-283, 1990.

R. Ratcliffe, "Arabic Broken Plurals: Arguments for a two-fold
classification of morphology".  In M. Eid and J. McCarthy (eds.),
_Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics II_ (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990).

Additionally (if that is of any interest), I have worked on computational
approaches to the broken plural:

G. Kiraz, _Computational Nonlinear Morphology: With Emphasis on Semitic
Languages_. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [hopefully
1999!]).

George Kiraz

----------
George Anton Kiraz, Ph.D.
Language Modeling Research
Bell Laboratories
Lucent Technologies
Room 2D-446
700 Mountain Ave.
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
Tel. +1 908 582 4074
Fax. +1 908 582 3306
email: gkiraz at research.bell-labs.com

Bell Labs Text-to-Speech: http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts
Hugoye Journal: http://www.acad.cua.edu/syrcom/Hugoye

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End of Arabic-L: 11 Jan 1999