Arabic-L:LING:Sibawayhi Site;Broken Plural Book

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 29 Jun 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Sibawayhi Site
2) Subject: Broken Plural Book

-------------------------Messages--------------------------------------
1)
Date: 29 Jun 1999
From: Michael Carter <m.g.carter at east.uio.no>
Subject: Sibawayhi Site

It occurred to me you and some others
might be interested to learn that I have finally got a demo version
published of a hypertext of seven chapters of Sibawayhi on the web.  The
URL is

http://www.hf.uio.no/east/sibawayhi/HomePage/index.htm

and although it is very klunky and still not technically complete I think
it is worth bringing to the attention of as many people as possible.  Later
this year I have the collaboration of Lutz Edzard for a whole year, so the
project will start to make progress when he gets here.

Mike


M. G. Carter, Dept. IØO, Oslo University
POB 1030 Blindern, Oslo N-0315
Tel. +47 22 856854 (O), +47 23 198138 (H), Fax +47 22 854140
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2)
Date: 29 Jun 1999
From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" <ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Subject: Broken Plural Book

The 'Broken' Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic:
allomorphy and analogy in non-concatenative morphology

Robert R. Ratcliffe, Ph.D.
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

 The formal aspects of non-concatenative morphology have received
considerable attention from linguists in recent years, but the
diachronic dimensions of such systems have been little explored.  The
current work applies a modern methodological and theoretical framework
to a classic problem in  Arabic and Semitic historical linguistics (IQ(J the
highly allomorphic system of (IT(Jstem-internal(IU(J or
(IT(Jbroken(IU(J plurals found
in Arabic and related languages.  The work shows that widely-accepted
views regarding the historical development of this system are untenable
and offers a new hypothesis to account for it.
 The first chapter lays out an explicit methodology for
comparative-historical research in morphology-- a necessary preliminary
since few explicit proposals have been made in this area. The second
chapter presents a relatively complete analysis of Arabic morphology
based on contemporary formal linguistic approaches to phonology and
morphology. The third chapter applies this analysis to the noun plural
system, establishing patterns of regularity and productivity in the
system, proposing a division of singular-plural pairs into seven
declension classes, defined by form and distribution. The fourth chapter
reviews the historical-linguistic literature, showing that neither of
the principal theories concerning the origin of the system-- semantic
shift or ablaut-type sound change-- accounts adequately for the data.
The fifth chapter offers a systematic comparison of the plural systems
of Semitic languages, incorporating much new research on the languages
of South Arabia and Ethiopia. The sixth chapter offers a reconstruction,
the main points of which are that the stem-internal plural was a feature
of Proto-Semitic, but that the rich allomorphy  in  the plural systems
of SW Semtic has developed within this subfamily as a result of sound
change and analogy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Associate Professor, 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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End of Arabic-L: 29 Jun 1999