University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series Linguistics January 1990 Foot and word in prosodic morphology: The Arabic broken plural John J. McCarthy University of Massachusetts, Amherst, [email protected] Alan Prince Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_faculty_pubs Part of the Morphology Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, and the Phonetics and Phonology Commons Recommended Citation McCarthy, John J. and Prince, Alan, "Foot and word in prosodic morphology: The Arabic broken plural" (1990). Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 11. 10.1007/BF00208524 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Linguistics at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Foot and Word in Prosodic Morphology: The Arabic Broken Plural Author(s): John J. McCarthy and Alan S. Prince Source: Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 209-283 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047699 Accessed: 25/06/2009 18:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. http://www.jstor.org JOHN J. MCCARTHY AND ALAN S. PRINCE FOOT AND WORD IN PROSODIC MORPHOLOGY: THE ARABIC BROKEN PLURAL* This article proposes a theory of PROSODIC DOMAIN CIRCUMSCRIPTION, by means of which rules sensitive to morphologicaldomain may be restrictedto a prosodically characterized(sub-)domain in a word or stem. The theory is illustratedprimarily by a comprehensiveanalysis of the Arabic broken plural; it is further supportedby analysisof a numberof processesfrom other languages,yielding a formaltypology of domain-circumscriptioneffects. The resultsobtained here dependon, and therefore confirm,two centralprinciples of ProsodicMorphology: (1) the ProsodicMorphology Hypothesis,which requiresthat templatesbe expressedin prosodic, not segmental terms; and (2) the TemplateSatisfaction Condition, which requiresthat all elements in templatesare satisfiedobligatorily. 1. INTRODUCTION The study of the relationshipbetween morphology and phonology has played an importantrole in recent linguisticinvestigations. On the one hand, work in the theory of Lexical Phonology speaks to the problem of phonologicalrule applicationin the course of a morphologicalderivation. On the other, the body of researchon templaticmorphology shows the essential role played by phonologicalstructure in capturingmorphological regularities. The theory of ProsodicMorphology developed in McCarthyand Prince (1986, 1988, forthcominga, b) advancesseveral proposalsabout the basic characterof phonologicalstructure and its consequencesfor morphology. Three fundamentaltheses are: (i) Prosodic Morphology Hypothesis. Templates are defined in terms of the authenticunits of prosody:mora (,u), syllable (a), foot (F), prosodicword (W), and so on. (ii) TemplateSatisfaction Condition. Satisfaction of templaticcon- straints is obligatory and is determined by the principles of prosody, both universaland language-specific. (iii) Prosodic Circumscriptionof Domains. The domain to which * We are indebted to Mark Aronoff, A. R. Ayoub, M. G. Carter, Morris Halle, Michael Kenstowicz,Armin Mester, and three anonymousreviewers for valuablecomments on this article.Special thanks go to LindaLombardi for a very close readingof the entiremanuscript that contributedmuch to the content and exposition. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 209-283, 1990. ? 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 210 JOHN J. MCCARTHY AND ALAN S. PRINCE morphologicaloperations apply may be circumscribedby pros- odic criteria as well as by the more familiar morphological ones. In particular,the minimalword within a domain may be selected as the locus of morphologicaltransformation in lieu of the whole domain. We will elaborate considerablyon these principlesbelow, focusing parti- cularlyon prosodiccircumscription. New developmentsin linguistictheory often bringillumination to long- standing descriptive problems, while at the same time exposing new difficultiesat a more subtle and abstractlevel. So it is with the Arabic brokenplural. In traditionalaccounts like that of Wright(1971: 191-233), pluralformation has all the propertiesof a poorly understoodor perhaps even chaotic process, requiringa dense taxonomyof 31 pluraltypes, each correspondingto as many as 11 singulartypes. The theory of CV-based templatic morphologyhas made considerableinroads into this apparent complexity, isolating a small set of formationalprocesses and unifying a fair number of traditionallydistinct patterns under a single template (McCarthy1979, 1981). But, as Hammond(1988) has observed, the stan- dard conception of templatic morphology brings with it a major new liability,the problemof transferringvarious characteristics from the singu- lar to the broken plural. This fundamentalproblem turns out to be intrac- table in CV-templatetheories, including(as we will show) the one pro- posed by Hammond. Prosodic Morphologyoffers a new perspectiveon the problem, and it is a goal of this article to demonstratehow the principalfeatures of the broken plural phenomenon follow directly from its characterizationin prosodic terms. In particular,it will emerge that the correct analysisof the transferproblem goes hand in hand with a wide generalizationover productiveplural types. We propose that the centralplural-forming strat- egy of the languageparses out an initial minimalword from the base - a prosodicallycircumscribed domain - and maps the contents of that mini- mal word onto an iambic foot. The broken plural, then, makes a full, systematicuse of the categoriesand operationsprovided by the theory of Prosodic Morphology,providing a particularlyinteresting test case and a robust new source of evidence for the theory. To secure our empiricalclaims, we have collected all nouns forming broken pluralsin the first half of Wehr (1971), the authoritativeEnglish- lang-uagedictionary of Modern Standardor Literary Arabic. The data base contains a total of about 3500 singular/pluralpairs, when doublets are considered, and should be more than adequate for establishingthe actual role and weight of the various patterns. Although most reference PROSODIC MORPHOLOGY 211 grammars,like Wright (1971), deal with Classical Arabic, while Wehr recordsthe contemporaryliterary language, the differencesbetween these two sources of evidence are negligible; our experience is that the corre- spondence is nearly exact except for certainvery rare pluralpatterns that have fallen into disuse. Furthermore,our investigationhas been much aided by the penetrating and exhaustive treatment of this problem by Levy (1971). This article will touch on virtuallyall the broken plural phenomena in Arabic and give a full accountof the dominantregularities of the system, aimingto achieve a match between theory and observationthat improves significantlyon previouswork. The articleis organizedas follows. Section 2 lays out the basic facts of the brokenplural and closely relateddiminutive systems and presents our analysisof them informally.Section 3 develops the formaltheory of prosodiccircumscription and appliesit to the descrip- tive problems of the Arabic plural and diminutive in all their detail. Section 4 reviews the shortcomingsof previous approaches,focusing on that of Hammond (1988). Section 5 treats issues that are ancillaryto the main thrustof our analysis;the conclusionbriefly summarizes the results. 2. THE BROKEN PLURAL AND DIMINUTIVE IN OUTLINE 2.1. The Large-scaleStructure of the Arabic Plural Traditionalgrammars of Arabic distinguishbetween two modes of plural formation, the broken plural and the sound plural. The broken plural primarilyinvolves internalmodification of the singularstem, as in nafslnu- fuus 'soul/pl.' or jundubljanaadib'locust/pl.'; the sound plural is formed by suffixationof masculine+uun or feminine +aat to a usuallyunchanged stem, as in (1)1,2 1 We will use the followingtranscription for the Arabicconsonants. h and ? are pharyngeals and t, d, s, z denote the emphatic (pharyngealized) consonants. t k q h b d j ? f