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). 1 This paper will highlight some of the salient morphological aspects of Sason Arabic, sometimes in comparison with other Arabic varieties. In section 2, I will discuss the general properties of Sason, particularly affixation strategies and templatic arrangement of inflectional morphemes. Section 3 discusses the interrogative and personal pronouns in Sason. The interrogative pronouns are given a historical account and personal pronouns are analyzed, concluding that the pronoun paradigm of Sason is consistent with the feature geometry of Harley and Ritter (2002). Section 4 deals with derivational morphology and other word formation processes. In section 5, I discuss the inflectional system of Sason Arabic in nouns, adjectives and verbs in detail, followed by a discussion of compounding, or the so-called iDaafa, in section 6. Section 7 concludes the paper. 2 GENERAL PROPERTIES OF SASON MORPHOLOGY 2.1 Affixation Strategies Sason Arabic makes use of both affixation and root-templatic morphology to express different valency-changing processes. In this section I will give some examples of these different strategies, which I will elaborate on in sections 4 and 5. For instance, passivization, reflexivization and anticausative, three valency-reducing operations, are realized in the form of a prefix that has the same phonological realization. The discussion will show that the root-and- pattern morphology of Sason contains considerable gaps compared to other varieties of Arabic. 2 2.1.1 The passive In order to express passive, Sason Arabic makes use of a different strategy from other Arabic dialects (Benmamoun 2000, Hallman 2000), namely, the prefixation of a passive morpheme to the perfective and imperfective verbs. Passivization is applicable only to transitive constructions. The prefix ın- is attached to the stem to form passives.34 (1) a. kitab qaritu-n book read.1SG-it ‘I read the book.’ b. kitab ın-qara. book PASS-read.3SG ‘The book was read.’ The prefix undergoes allomorphy and realized as in- with imperfective verbs. (2) a. kıllom a-yel šorbiye every day 1SG-eat soup ‘I eat soup every day.’ b. kıllom šorbiye in-ti-yel every day soup PASS-3SG-eat ‘Soup is eaten every day.’ 3 List of abbreviations used: 1, 2, 3: first, second, third person, ANTIC: anticausative, COP: copula, DEF: definite article, DUAL: dual F: feminine, GEN: genitive, M: masculine, PASS: passive, PL: plural, POSS: possessive, PRES: present, REFL: reflexive, SG: singular. 4 The letter [ı] corresponds to the high central unrounded vowel, i.e. [ɨ] in IPA, while [i] is the front, high vowel. 3 In Standard Arabic and other modern colloquial dialects, on the other hand, passivization is expressed through a change in the vocalic melody, which also has two allomorphs: [u_i] appears in the perfect, where /i/ overwrites the stem vowel and /u/ everything leftward; [u_a] appears in the imperfective, where /a/ overwrites the vowel melody of the entire stem and /u/ the vowel of the prefix (Hallman 2000:5). This property, known as root-and-pattern morphology, i.e. transfixation, has been lost for some of the forms, e.g. the passivization and reflexivization. However, Sason still preserves this type of morphology in the some root patterns, e.g. ZRB ‘hit’, KTB ‘write’. (3) kitāb ‘book’ mekteb ‘school’ kutuphāne ‘library’ mektub ‘letter’ kātib ‘clerk’ The examples in (3) show that although the root-and-pattern morphology is observed in Sason, it is not systematic, and different roots are compatible with only various patterns in a rather random way. Another striking property of (3) is that the only forms derived from the root KTB are nouns, while the verb ‘to write’ is expressed by an unrelated form, namely qara ‘lit: he wrote’. 2.1.2 The reflexive and anticausative The reflexive is also realized as a prefix with the same morpheme as passive, i.e. ın-. Therefore, the sentence in (4) is ambiguous between ‘you washed yourselves’ and ‘you were washed’. 4 (4) ın-xasal-to REFL-washed-2PL ‘You washed yourselves.’ Another clear example of event-changing operation is anticausative, where the agent is completely removed from the argument structure. Anticausative is also expressed through the same prefixal morpheme ın-. (5) faƔz le mara ın-qaraf. leg of woman ANTIC-broke.3M ‘The woman’s leg broke.’ 2.1.3 Other Affixes The adjectival participle mı- is also a prefix, which expresses a state. (6) a. a-fte b. m-aftu 1SG-open ‘open’ ‘I open’ (7) a. a-qawweǰ b. mı-qawweǰ 1SG-close ‘closed’ ‘I close’ An example of infix in Sason is -t-, as in (i)š-t-agal ‘be occupied’ (base: šagala). This infix attaches to the right of the first consonant and derives an inchoative interpretation. It is not very productive though, for instance, it is available to the base ‘sick’ (8)a, but not in ‘yellow’ in (8)b. 5 (8) a. raxu ‘sick’ irtaxa ‘to become/fall sick’ b. asfar ‘yellow’ isfar ‘to become yellow’ The -t- infix in the form irtaxa ‘to become/fall sick’ gives an inchoative meaning. The appearance of the infix is not dependent on the lexical category of the base (see Section 4.1.3). The derivational morpheme -tije is a nominalizing suffix, it has the semantic notion of ‘state of/quality of’ although it is translated into English with various suffixes. Modern Standard Arabic has a similar morphological process through suffixing the feminine nisba ending -iyya to an already existing word stem. This suffix derives nouns from nominals (nouns and adjectives). (9) a. raxu ‘sick’ raxu-tije ‘sickness’ b. zƔer ‘child’ zƔer-tije ‘childhood’ c. hamal ‘porter’ hamal-tije ‘(the state of) being a porter’ d. awwal ‘early’ awwal-tije ‘priority’ To my knowledge, the suffix imposes no certain semantic or morphological restriction on the bases that it attaches to. The base can be human, inanimate, abstract noun. Moreover, it can attach to stems of various syllable sizes. One particular property of this process is that the nouns derived with this morpheme have the feminine gender. 6 Subject agreement is realized as a suffix on the verb in the perfective as in (10)a, and as both prefixes and suffixes in the imperfective, as in (10)b. In addition to the position of person agreement, the two forms differ with respect to their internal vocalic melody of the verb stem, another instance of transfixation (see section 5.3 for further discussion). (10) a. faqas-te run.PAST-2F.SG ‘You ran.’ b. tə-fqəz-e 2F.SG-run-2F.SG ‘You run.’ 2.2 Morphological Typology and Sason Arabic Despite exhibiting the properties of a root-and-pattern language, Sason has some instances where the same morph expresses simultaneously two or more morphemes, a property of fusional languages. For instance, subject agreement is an instance where a single morpheme expresses multiple morphs or grammatical properties. The example in (11) shows how a single suffixal segment expresses multiple features. (11) faqas-te singular, 2nd person, feminine ‘You ran.’ Similarly, a morph expresses multiple features, e.g. number, person and gender, in genitive constructions. 7 (12) a. axt-ki sister-GEN.2F.SG ‘your (f.) sister’ b. axt-ey sister-GEN.2M.SG ‘your (m.) sister’ (13) a. axt-a sister-GEN.3F.SG ‘his (f.) sister’ b. axt-u sister-GEN.3M.SG ‘his (m.) sister’ The example in (8)b can be treated as an instance of multiple exponence, where multiple segments express one piece of information. This property is observed in the imperfective aspect of the verb (see section 5.3). The examples in (14) are instances where there is a one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and morph. In (14)a, the suffix -aḏ expresses plurality, and in (14)b, the feminine noun is marked by the suffix –e (For other examples, see also section 5.1.1) (14) a. axt-aḏ sister-PL ‘sisters’ b. ġaruf-e (cf. ġaruf (masc.)) lamb-F ‘female lamb’ 8 3 PRONOUN MORPHOLOGY This section discusses the properties of Sason Arabic pronouns, focusing particularly on interrogative and personal pronouns.