Is There Really Root-and-Pattern Morphology? Evidence from Classical Arabic

Abstract

The morphologies of Semitic languages have most often been described as a system of roots and patterns suggesting a pluri-consonantal root. For example, the putative Arabic root √qbr has the derived forms qabara ‘he buried’, qubira ‘he was buried’, ʔaqburu ‘I bury’, qabr ‘grave’ (pl. qubūr), and maqbar ‘cemetery’ (pl. maqābir). Both traditional Semitist and generative morpheme- based research assume pluri-consonantal roots. However, there have been attempts to explain root-and-pattern morphology in terms of apophony instead. In these accounts, so-called Melodic Overwriting provides the morphophonological mechanism by which word-internal vowels are overwritten by vocalic affixes. The contrary approaches have been used to argue for different models of morphology (root-based vs. word-/stem-based), intermingling morphological theory with phonological representations. In this paper, a new theory of root-and-pattern morphology is proposed. It is shown that pluri-consonantal roots face several theoretical and empirical problems which are solved by assuming vocalised roots in a similar way to stem- and word-based approaches, but with the advantages of morpheme-based frameworks.