The Lexical Semantics of the Arabic Verb OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, Spi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, Spi

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Lexical Semantics of the Arabic Verb OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, Spi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, Spi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi The Lexical Semantics of the Arabic Verb OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi The Lexical Semantics of the Arabic Verb PETER JOHN GLANVILLE 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, , United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Peter John Glanville The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN –––– (hbk.) –––– (pbk.) Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi For Chelsea OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi Contents Acknowledgments x List of figures xii List of abbreviations and symbols xiii A note on primary sources xvi Introduction and overview . Introduction . Overview Words, roots, and patterns . Introduction . Roots, patterns, and word families . Roots, patterns, and derivation . Words, structure, and content . Words from verbs . Verbs from words . Summary and conclusion Ground form verb patterns . Introduction . Verb marking and prototype theory . Pattern I(a) .. Energy transfer .. Symmetrical states .. Cognition verbs .. Locative configurations .. One-participant actions . Pattern I(i) .. Experienced states .. Subject as location .. Sequence verbs .. Influence . Pattern I(u) . Summary and conclusion OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi viii Contents Reflexive marking . Introduction . Reflexive marking on the verb . Alternations .. Subject as beneficiary .. Actions on the self .. Symmetry .. Subject as patient .. An agency continuum . A verb pattern .. Denominals .. Result states .. Verb building .. Consistent marking . Summary and conclusion Symmetry . Introduction . Symmetry .. Resistance .. Risk .. Competition .. Interaction, exchange, and sharing .. Helping, hugging, shaking hands .. Co-action .. Inherent symmetry .. Implementing symmetry . Symmetry and reflexivity .. Reciprocity .. Counterfactuals .. Chaining situations .. Co-action (again) .. Progressive change .. Co-symmetry . Summary and conclusion Causation and actionalization . Introduction . Marked causatives . Giving and sending . Activated states OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi Contents ix . Base as product . Base as goal . Actions on the self . Causer-oriented actions . Result states . Transfer . Conclusion Repetition . Introduction . Repetition and linguistic marking . Gemination .. Repeated division .. Repeated configuration and motion .. Incrementality .. Repeated taking . Reduplication of the first and second consonants .. Repeated sound .. Rhythm .. Sound symbolism, etymons, and phonesthemes .. On the direction of derivation . Overlapping functions .. Causation and repetition .. Expansion of faʕfaʕa . Summary and conclusion The beginnings of a system . Introduction . A system of constructions . Accounting for the system .. Merging words .. Abstraction of relational structures .. Analogy, categorization, and shape-invariant morphology . Derivation and conceptual blending . Looking forward Primary sources References Index OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi Acknowledgments This book is the result of my curiosity about and love for the Arabic language, and this is something that has been encouraged in one way or another by a large number of people. My students and colleagues at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman were fantastic teachers who made me want to learn more, and after leaving I was lucky to continue my education with some of the best teachers working in the field of Arabic language pedagogy. Like thousands of learners of Arabic, I owe special thanks to Mahmoud Al-Batal, who has worked tirelessly and with great dedication to trans- form the way that Arabic as a second language is taught, producing materials, training teachers, working on assessment, and convincing decision-makers that Arabic must be taught for communication. I would also like to thank Mohammad Mohammad for his constant encouragement and support, usually provided under his favorite shade tree at the University of Texas at Austin, all of my teachers in Damascus, especially Manal Yosef and Ghada Housen, the Shadeed family of Damascus, and my friend Osama Shamieh. At the University of Maryland I am grateful to Dina Hefnawy, Lutf Alkebsi, Zein Elamine, Heba Salem, and Ahmad Hanafy for being happy to answer my random questions about roots and patterns at the drop of a hat. Many people have also supported the research and writing process. At the insti- tutional level the University of Maryland Graduate School funded my research with a Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) in , and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures provided a semester of leave. I am thankful to my colleagues in the School for providing valuable advice, most notably Michele Mason, Alene Moyer, Steve Ross, and Ryan Long. My colleague in Arabic, Valerie Anishchenkova, has been a good friend and source of moral support, and our coordinator, Lianne Berne, has been fantastic in every way. Outside of Maryland, I am grateful to Vicki Sunter at Oxford University Press for being positive, efficient, and professional throughout the whole submission and review process, to Karin Ryding for insightful comments on the draft book proposal, Angela Harmon for reading early draft chapters, and a number of anonymous reviewers who have encouraged me to be bolder in places, and less outrageous in others. The research I have undertaken for this work would not have been possible without the excellent Arabic corpus devel- oped and maintained by Dilworth Parkinson at Brigham Young University, and like many other researchers I am indebted to him for this. I first encountered the name Kristen Brustad when I bought an Arabic language textbook in Morocco. Many years later when I was a graduate student at UT she turned up and changed my life. I could never have written this book without the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi Acknowledgments xi linguistic training she provided, or without the confidence that she instilled in me to do what I think should be done. This is to say nothing of her considerable input into this book at all stages. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, for keeping me on the straight and narrow and for eventually refraining from asking how much longer all this is going to take; my dogs, past and present, for our walks; my son, for making me laugh every day; and my wife Chelsea, who I love with all my heart. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi List of figures . Content and structure of ʕadda ‘to count’, ʕadiid ‘numerous’, and ʕadad ‘number’ . Content and structure of qatala ‘to kill’ . Content and structure of samiʕa ‘to hear’ . Content and structure of wasalạ ‘to connect’ . Content and structure of wasalạ ‘to arrive’ . Content and structure of qaruba ‘to be near’ . Content and structure of istawaa ‘to level out’ . Content and structure of tasaawaa ‘to be equal’ . The adjective ʤayyid ‘good’ contrasted with the verb ʔaʤaada ‘to do well’ . The conceptual blend represented by qadam ‘foot’ OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/2/2018, SPi List of abbreviations and symbols (a) Transcription In transliterating data from Modern Standard Arabic I use the following symbols: Arabic Character Transliteration Symbol Articulatory Features ʔ Glottal stop ﺀ aa Long open front vowel ﻯ ,ﺍ b Voiced labial stop ﺏ t Voiceless dental stop ﺕ θ Voiceless interdental fricative ﺙ ʤ Voiced alveolar fricative ﺝ ḥ Voiceless pharyngeal fricative ﺡ x Voiceless velar fricative ﺥ d Voiced dental stop ﺩ ð Voiced interdental fricative ﺫ r Alveolar liquid ﺭ z Voiced dental fricative ﺯ s Voiceless dental fricative ﺱ ʃ Voiceless alveolar fricative ﺵ ṣ Voiceless emphatic dental fricative ﺹ ḍ Voiced emphatic dental stop ﺽ ṭ Voiceless emphatic dental stop ﻁ ẓ Voiced emphatic interdental fricative ﻅ ʕ Voiced pharyngeal fricative ﻉ ġ Voiced velar fricative ﻍ f Voiceless labiodental fricative ﻑ q Voiceless uvular stop ﻕ k Voiceless velar stop ﻙ l Dental liquid ﻝ m Labial nasal ﻡ n Alveolar nasal ﻥ h Voiceless glottal fricative ﻩ w, uu Voiced labial
Recommended publications
  • Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic
    CORPUS STUDY OF TENSE, ASPECT, AND MODALITY IN DIGLOSSIC SPEECH IN CAIRENE ARABIC BY OLA AHMED MOSHREF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Elabbas Benmamoun, Chair Professor Eyamba Bokamba Professor Rakesh M. Bhatt Assistant Professor Marina Terkourafi ABSTRACT Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and sports interviews on four Egyptian satellite TV channels. The computational analysis of the data shows that systematic and content morphemes from both varieties of Arabic combine in principled ways. Syntactic considerations play a critical role with regard to the frequency and direction of code-switching between the negative marker, subject, or complement on one hand and the verb on the other. Morph-syntactic constraints regulate different types of discourse but more formal topics may exhibit more mixing between Colloquial aspect or future markers and Standard verbs. ii To the One Arab Dream that will come true inshaa’ Allah! عربية أنا.. أميت دمها خري الدماء.. كما يقول أيب الشاعر العراقي: بدر شاكر السياب Arab I am.. My nation’s blood is the finest.. As my father says Iraqi Poet: Badr Shaker Elsayyab iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m sincerely thankful to my advisor Prof. Elabbas Benmamoun, who during the six years of my study at UIUC was always kind, caring and supportive on the personal and academic levels.
    [Show full text]
  • Arabic Verbs Made Easy with Effort
    Arabic online for English Speakers Basic Arabic أسس by practice العربـيـةبالتطبيق Arabic Verbs Made Easy with Effort Ghalib Al-Hakkak Singular Dual Plural Past Present Past Present Past Present نـ ـــــــ ـــــــ نا نـ ـــــــ ـــــــ نا أ ـــــــ ـــــــت تـ ـــــــ ون ـــــــ تم تـ ـــــــ ان ـــــــ تـام تـ ـــــــ ـــــــت تـ ـــــــ ن ـــــــ تـن تـ ـــــــ ان ـــــــ تـام تـ ـــــــ يـن ـــــــت يـ ـــــــ ون ـــــــ وا يـ ـــــــ ان ـــــــ ا يـ ـــــــ ـــــــَ يـ ـــــــ ن ـــــــ ن تـ ـــــــ ان ـــــــ تا تـ ـــــــ ـــــــت Singular Dual Plural مجزوم منصوب مرفوع مجزوم منصوب مرفوع مجزوم منصوب مرفوع Same spelling Same spelling نكتب Same spelling Same spelling نكتب Same spelling Same spelling أكتب تكتبوا تكتبوا تكتبون تكتبا تكتبا تكتبان Same spelling Same spelling تكتب Same spelling Same spelling تكتبـن تكتبا تكتبا تكتبان تكتبي تكتبي تكتبيـن يكتبوا يكتبوا يكتبون يكتبا يكتبا يكتبان Same spelling Same spelling يكتب Same spelling Same spelling يكتبـن تكتبا تكتبا تكتبان Same spelling Same spelling تكتب Partial - for personnal use Arabic online for English Speakers http://www.al-hakkak.fr Basic Arabic أسس by practice العربـيـةبالتطبيق Arabic Verbs Made Easy with Effort Version 1.4 Tables, exercises, corrections and index Textbook with online recordings Ghalib Al-Hakkak © Ghalib Al-Hakkak, Self published author - France ( [email protected] ) 1 Partial - for personnal use © Ghalib Al-Hakkak, August 2016 ISBN-13: 978-1536813913 / ISBN-10: 1536813915 Author : Ghalib AL-HAKKAK, Marmagne 71710, Burgandy, France Publisher : Ghalib AL-HAKKAK, Self published author (auteur auto-édité) Printed by and distributed through : Amazon Website : www.al-hakkak.fr Email : [email protected] 2 Partial - for personnal use Introduction It is important for an English speaker to choose the most suitable way to learn Arabic verbs.
    [Show full text]
  • Inflectional Morphology in Arabic and English: a Contrastive Study
    International Journal of English Linguistics; Vol. 5, No. 2; 2015 ISSN 1923-869X E-ISSN 1923-8703 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education Inflectional Morphology in Arabic and English: A Contrastive Study Muayad Abdul-Halim Ahmad Shamsan1,2 & Abdul-majeed Attayib3 1 College of Science and Arts, University of Bisha, Saudi Arabia 2 Faculty of Arts, Omdurman Islamic University, Sudan 3 English Language Centre, Umm AlQura University, Saudi Arabia Correspondence: Muayad Abdul-Halim Ahmad Shamsan, M. A Lecturer, College of Science and Arts, University of Bisha, Saudi Arabia. E-mail: [email protected] Received: January 14, 2015 Accepted: February 12, 2015 Online Published: March 29, 2015 doi:10.5539/ijel.v5n2p139 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v5n2p139 Abstract This paper investigates Arabic and English inflectional morphology with a view to identifying the similarities and differences between them. The differences between the two languages might be the main reason for making errors by Arab EFL learners. Predicting the sources of such errors might help both teachers and learners to overcome these problems. By identifying the morphological differences between the two languages, teachers will determine how and what to teach, on the one hand, and students will know how and what to focus on when learning the target language, on the other. Keywords: inflectional morphology, modern standard Arabic, contrastive analysis 1. Introduction 1.1 Inflectional Morphology Inflectional affixes are those which are affixed to words to indicate grammatical function. Spencer, (1991, p. 21) points out “Inflectional operations leave untouched the syntactic category of the base, but they too add extra elements.
    [Show full text]
  • A Comparative Analysis of the Arabic and English Verb Systems Using the Qur’An Arabic Corpus
    A Comparative Analysis of The Arabic and English Verb Systems Using the Qur’an Arabic Corpus A corpus-based study Jawharah Saeed Alasmari Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Languages May, 2020 I The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Jawharah Alasmari to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2020 The University of Leeds and Jawharah Saeed Alasmari II Publication Chapters two, three, and five of this thesis are based on the following jointly-authored publications. The candidate is the principal author of all original contributions presented in these papers, the co-authors acted in an advisory capacity, providing feedback, general guidance and comments. Alasmari, J., Watson, J. C. E., and Atwell E. (2018). A Contrastive Study of the Arabic and English Verb Tense and Aspect A Corpus-Based Approach. PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 3(3), pp. 1604-1615. Alasmari, J., Watson J. C.E., and Atwell, E. (2017). A comparative analysis of verb tense and aspect in Arabic and English using Google Translate. International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technology, 5(3), pp. 9-14.
    [Show full text]
  • Aspect-Marking Basic Verbs in Arabic Dana Abdulrahim University of Alberta
    Polyfunctionality: Basic Verbs Monday 24 June / 16:30-16:55 / CCIS L1-140 Aspect-marking Basic Verbs in Arabic Dana Abdulrahim University of Alberta Cognitive approaches to language assert that our earliest, primary bodily experiences with the world play a very crucial role in shaping linguistic structures (Lakoff, 1987). Basic Verbs, or lexical items encoding basic bodily events and states, such as COME, GO, SIT, STAND, LIE, EAT, DRINK, TAKE, GIVE, etc. (Newman, 2004), show a proliferation of uses across languages ranging from polysemous and idiomatic uses to patterns of grammaticalization and collocation. Cross-linguistically, verbs denoting GO, for instance, can assume numerous grammatical functions such as marking future tense, habitual and progressive aspects, purpose and change-of-state, etc. (Heine and Kuteva, 2002). A great deal of research has been dedicated to the investigation of the properties as well as uses of Basic Verbs in several languages, such as GO and COME (e.g. Fillmore, 1966; Radden, 1996; to name but a few), EAT and DRINK (Newman and Rice, 2006), SIT, STAND, and LIE (Newman and Rice, 2004), and GIVE (e.g. Newman, 1996). While the existing body of cross-linguistic research on Basic Verbs is growing, there is relatively little research that has been done on the variations in functions and behavior of Basic Verbs across standard and spoken varieties of Arabic. This paper will discuss the lexico-syntactic properties of certain Basic Verbs in Arabic – more specifically, aspect-marking Basic Verbs – in standard and some non-standard varieties of Arabic. An online MSA corpus (www.arabicorpus.byu.edu) and a spoken corpus constructed by the author will be the main source for contextualized verb uses.
    [Show full text]
  • Cultural and Linguistic Guidelines for Language Evaluation of Arab-American
    Cultural and linguistic guidelines for language evaluation of Arab-American children using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) Reference this material as: Khamis-Dakwar,R., Al-Askary,H., Benmamoun,A., Ouali,H., Green,H., Leung,T., & Al-Asbahi,K. (2012, September 30). Cultural and linguistic guidelines for language evaluation of Arab-American children using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF).Available from doi:xxxxx Copyright © 2012 Reem Khamis-Dakwar. All rights reserved Part I: The Cultural and Linguistic Background of Arab-Americans Introduction Based on the 2000 census, Arab Americans comprise 0.42% of the population in the United States (U.S.). The Arab-American population in the United States has been showing a steady increase since the 1980s (US. Bureau of the Census, 2005)1. Similar to other minority populations in the U.S., there has been a corresponding increase in the number of children referred for language assessment from this specific cultural and linguistic background. It is one of the top ten languages among English Language Learners (LLEs) in the U.S. (Batalova & Margie, 2010). Arab-Americans, as part of the diverse Arab population, compose a heterogeneous group; they come to the U.S. from countries in the North African region (such as Morocco), the Mediterranean region (such as Jordan), or the Arab Gulf region (such as Qatar) (Al-Hazza & Lucking, 2005) and may belong to a variety of religious faiths such as Islam, Christianity, Druze or Judaism. Despite these differences, Arab- Americans share historical memories, cultural values, cultural practices and Arabic as a native language 2(Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2012).
    [Show full text]
  • Stative and Stativizing Constructions in Arabic News Reports: a Corpus-Based Study Written by Aous Mansouri Has Been Approved for the Department of Linguistics
    Stative and Stativizing Constructions in Arabic News Reports: A Corpus-Based Study by Aous Mansouri M.B.B.S., King Saud University, 1999 M.A. University of Colorado, 2005 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics 2016 This thesis entitled: Stative and Stativizing Constructions in Arabic News Reports: A Corpus-Based Study written by Aous Mansouri has been approved for the Department of Linguistics Dr. Laura Michaelis-Cummings Dr. Martha Palmer Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. !ii Mansouri, Aous A. (Ph.D., Linguistics) Stative and Stativizing Constructions in Arabic News Reports: A Corpus-Based Study Thesis directed by Dr. Laura A. Michaelis This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range of stativity diagnostics are implemented. The constructions analyzed include both those that select for the class of states and those that yield various stative construals of otherwise dynamic predications. The constructions examined range from inflectional constructions to verb-headed phrasal patterns to verbless predicates; a lexicalist implementation of Construction Grammar, Sign Based Construction Grammar, provides a uniform format for representing the constructions as feature-structure descriptions.
    [Show full text]
  • Sason Arabic
    SASON ARABIC FARUK AKKUŞ 1 INTRODUCTION Sason Arabic is a Semitic language spoken in the provinces of Bitlis and Batman in eastern Turkey and is one of the several Arabic varieties spoken in Anatolia. It is part of the larger Mesopotamian dialect area, in other words it is a continuation of the Iraqi Arabic dialects. Sason Arabic is classified as a member of Kozluk-Sason-Muş group (Jastrow 1978, 2005a, 2006), and is categorized as qəltu-dialect based on Blanc (1964).1 The estimated number of speakers is around 2,000 to 3,000 speakers based on the population of villages Sason is spoken in. The absence of official literacy in Arabic, and hence the absence of diglossia,2 and the strong influence from the surrounding languages, such as Turkish (the official language of Turkey), Kurdish and Zazaki (Indo-Iranian) and Armenian (spoken by Sason speakers of Armenian origin) are the two primary factors that have shaped Sason Arabic linguistically and sociologically. Sason speakers are usually multilingual, speaking some of the mentioned languages. 1 Blanc’s (1964) seminal book Communal Dialects in Baghdad is an investigation of Arabic spoken in three religious communities, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, who were speaking radically different dialects despite living in the same town. Based on the word “I said”- qultu in Classical Arabic- Blanc called the Jewish and Christian dialects qəltu dialects, and the Muslim dialect a gilit dialect. 2 The term diglossia refers to a linguistic situation where there are two linguistic varieties, called High and Low, which are, to some extent, in complementary distribution, though there is significant overlap and code-switching (Jastrow 2005a).
    [Show full text]
  • The Three Forms of Arabic Causative
    2009. OPAL. No. 2. <http://www.gial.edu/opal/index.htm> The Three Forms of Arabic Causative BY DAVID C. FORD Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics Student ABSTRACT Of great interest to the study of the syntax of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are the multiple ways in which a causative can be derived from a basic verb root. One of the hallmarks of Arabic grammar is the concept of the triliteral verb root, a basic string of three consonants that denotes the general idea of a verb. Inflections of this root through the use of short vowels, long vowels and specific consonantal affixes render different Forms of this basic root—a total of ten in common Arabic use—that are logically and systematically related to the underlying root (Scheindlin, 2007). This system of derivations is highly productive and extremely regular. Three of these Forms render causative constructions—or at least render verb meanings that can be interpreted as such. However, few Arabic grammars regularly address all three varieties in a discussion on the causative. Most focus on Forms II and IV, and do not address the ability of Form I to take on a causative meaning, at least not in the same discussion. Hallman (2006) addresses a comparison of the causative Form I and Form II, but does not address Form IV at all. This paper brings all three Forms together for a concise comparison of all possible ways to form a causative in MSA. It examines the derivations and proposes Word Formation Rules, compares meaning patterns of the Forms and considers transitivity and semantic restrictions that are involved.
    [Show full text]
  • Phonology-Of-Weak-Verbs-1.Pdf
    THE PHONOLOGY OF WEAK VERBS A SIMPLE DIAGRAM OF RULES TIMOTHY MITCHELL PRINCETON UNIVERSITY The conjugation of Arabic verbs whose second or third radical is weak differs from the conjugation of strong verbs according to a small number of precise phonological rules. This article presents those rules in the form of a diagram. The diagram is easily memorized, and enables the student to produce from a knowledge of the strong verb the correct form for any weak root. It may be used as an aid or even an alternative to the memorization of the dozen or more paradigms of hollow and defective verbs. It also explains the formation from weak roots of participles, masdars, and defective nouns. The diagram adopts the terminology used in Elementary Modern Standard Arabic (Michigan, 1976) and parts of it simply reorganize some of the rules presented there. All Arabic letters are transliterated, because the presence of vowels (which determine the fate of the weak consonant) is clearer in transliteration. The examples given below illustrate how the rules of the diagram apply, first for defective verbs, then for hollow verbs, and finally for nominal forms. Each of the five notes included with the examples covers a point or exception not mentioned explicitly in the diagram. The diagram is explained as follows. When one of the two weak letters W (3) and Y ( g ) occurs as the second or third radical of a verb, conjugating that verb according to the paradigms of the strong verb would place the weak radical amid various combinations of preceding and following vowels.
    [Show full text]
  • Urdu/Hindi Motion Verbs and Their Implementation in a Lexical Resource
    Urdu/Hindi Motion Verbs and Their Implementation in a Lexical Resource Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy presented by Annette Hautli-Janisz at the Faculty of Humanities Department of Linguistics Date of the oral examination: July 4, 2014 First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Miriam Butt Second supervisor: Dr. Tracy Holloway King Abstract A central task of natural language processing is to find a way of answering the question Who did what to whom, how, when and where? with automatic means. This requires insights on how a language realizes events and the participants that partake in them and how this information can be encoded in a human- as well as machine-readable way. In this thesis, I investigate the ways that the spatial notions of figure, ground, path and manner of motion are realized in Urdu/Hindi and I implement these insights in a computationally-usable lexical resource, namely Urdu/Hindi VerbNet. I show that in particular the encoding of complex predicates can serve as a guiding principle for the encoding of similar constructions in other VerbNets. This enterprise involves a detailed investigation of the syntax-semantics interface of motion verb constructions in Urdu/Hindi, in particular the different syntactic al- ternation patterns that realize motion events. As it turns out, Urdu/Hindi employs complex predicates of motion that denote the manner of motion along a path with two verbal heads. This construction exhibits similar syntactic properties as aspec- tual complex predicates in the language (Butt 1995). The thesis shows that the combinatorial possibilities between main verb and light verb are driven by the man- ner/result complementarity established by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2008, 2013), according to which verbs either lexicalize non-scalar manner of motion or denote a scalar result event.
    [Show full text]
  • Urbanization and the Development of Gender in the Arabic Dialects
    Urbanization and the Development of Gender in the Arabic Dialects MUHAMMAD AL-SHARKAWI (Wayne State University, Detroit) Abstract This article makes the claim that the difference between Bedouin and urban dialects of Arabic in gender representation in the plural is a function of the urbanization process the urban dialects of Arabic went through in the 7th century in the conquered territories. Contact-induced linguistic processes of koineization and structural simplification in the newly established urban centers in the Middle East and North Africa helped enhance the gender development that was already in effect before the Arab conquests. By comparing Bedouin and urban dialects to Classical Arabic, the article establishes that the three varieties were in a process of development in gender. Classical Arabic stopped at a particular stage, and Bedouin and urban dialects continued. Comparing Central Asian dialects to urban dialects of Egypt we can see that at least to the 8th century gender was a common feature of Peninsular dialects. The article concludes by stating that the urban dialects developed further to lose all gender distinction in the plural because of the leveling and borrowing processes of the koineization in the urban centers in their formative period. Keywords: Contact Arabic, feminine gender, development, koineization, simplification, Foreigner Talk. Introduction In the last 25 years, since Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) seminal work on contact- induced language change the relationship between structural development and human con- tact took center stage in the field of language development. Although the relationship between the non-linguistic settings (urban and/or otherwise) and the formal aspects of lan- guage became prominent in socio-linguistics as early as the 1960s,1 the relationship between the urban setting and change in language behavior and development did not take momentum much further beyond the theoretical establishment, at least in the field of Arabic linguistics.
    [Show full text]