Poznan09

External evidence and the linguistic structure of Arabic: Decomposition to the root in aphasic speech and child language (10 classes)

Ali Idrissi

The first part of this course focuses on the issue of morphological decomposition and the status of the consonantal root and templates in Arabic non-linear morphology. The second part reviews the types of external evidence bearing on this issue. The discussion centers on aphasic and child speech errors and on if and how they can be used to argue for the existence of the abstract root and template morphemes. Some output-oriented alternative approaches are also assessed.

Readings (to be made available electronically or as hard copies):

Davis, Stuart, and Bushra Zawaydeh. 2001. Arabic hypocoristics and the status of the consonantal root. Linguistic Inquiry 32:512–520.
Idrissi, Ali, , Jean-François and Renée Béland. 2008. On the Mental Representation of Arabic Roots. Linguistic Inquiry 39:221–259.
Idrissi, Ali, and Eva Kehayia. 2004. Morphological units in the Arabic mental lexicon: Evidence from an individual with deep dyslexia. Brain and Language 90:183–197.
Prunet, Jean-François, Renée Béland, and Ali Idrissi. 2000. The mental representation of Semitic words. Linguistic Inquiry 31:609–648.
Prunet, Jean-François. 2006. External evidence and the Semitic root. Morphology 16:41–67.
Ratcliffe, Robert R. 2004. Sonority-based parsing at the margins of Arabic morphology: In response to Prunet, Béland and Idrissi (2000) and Davis and Zawaydeh (1999, 2001). Al-‘Arabiyya 37:73–95.

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