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Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics
Volumes & issues:
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An Introductory Note to Noam Agmon's “Materials and Language” with Special Attention to the Issue of Biliteral Roots
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- Biliteral roots have been, and still are controversial. Because Noam Agmon's paper, to which this note is an introduction, assumes the reality of biliteral roots, the issue is revisited. Several important arguments in support of the biliterality of C1C2C2 and C1C1C2 verbs were put forth in the course of the past thirty years. They are reviewed here, along with the criticisms they have triggered. It is concluded that the evidence weighs in favor of recognizing synchronically active biliteral roots subjected to templatic pressure. It is further suggested that a by-product of Agmon's study and findings is a time frame for the emergence of templatic morphology in the Middle East.
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Materials and Language: Pre-Semitic Root Structure Change Concomitant with Transition to Agriculture
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- Materials and language have evolved together. Thus the archaeological dating of materials possibly also dates the words which name them. Analysis of Proto-Semitic (PS) material terms reveals that materials discovered during the Neolithic are uniquely triconsonantal (3c) whereas biconsonantal (2c) names were utilized for materials of the Old Stone-Age. This establishes a major transition in pre-Semitic language structure, concomitant with the transition to agriculture. Associations of material names with other words in the PS lexicon reveal the original context of material utilization. In particular, monosyllabic 2c names are associated with a pre-Natufian cultural background, more than 16,500 years ago. Various augments introduced during the Natufian, and perhaps even more intensively during the Early Neolithic, were absorbed into the roots, tilting the equilibrium from 2c toward 3c roots, and culminating in an agricultural society with strictly triconsonantal language morphology.
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Empirical and Theoretical Arguments in Favor of the Discontinuous Root in Semitic Languages
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- This paper argues for the existence of a discontinuous root morpheme in the Semitic languages. Although this notion is often used in the analysis of these languages, it has been claimed in some surface-oriented studies to be a mere theoretical artifact. The first part of this paper presents two arguments from the realm of verbal inflection. It is shown that no surface form can serve consistently as the base for other forms in either Modern Hebrew or Chaha, two Semitic languages. It is further argued that some morphophonological processes in Chaha must be regarded as applying to the root. Applying such processes to the surface stem would result in incorrect forms. The second part of the paper treats discontinuous effects in nominal formations. It is argued that agentive nouns in Modern Hebrew can be built either on another noun or on the root. Without the notion of the root, one is obliged to list all the cases which we propose are root-derived. Such listing obscures the entirely regular and consistently predictable form of root-derived agentives.
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Event Internal Pluractionality in Modern Hebrew: A Semantic Analysis of One Verbal Reduplication Pattern
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This paper examines the semantic effect of reduplication in a subclass of piel verbs in Modern Hebrew, namely quadrilateral reduplicated roots (QRR). It is observed that the verbs in this class share many properties with pluractional verbs cross-linguistically, and consequently, that a pluractionality-based analysis of this verb class is more productive than its characterization as expressing 'iteration' or 'repetition', suggested in the past. More specifically, it is proposed that the verbs in the QRR class express event internal pluractionality, in the original sense proposed by Cusic 1981, which was more formally captured in Wood 2007 and in Tovena & Kihm 2008 as involving a groupification operation on a plurality of subevents. This proposal is motivated by the observation that the QRR verbs denote events which are possibly telic, which can distribute over time and space, but not over participants, and whose subevents must be temporally close to each other. Empirically, these properties have been reported to characterize event internal pluractionals in a variety of languages. Theoretically, they are compatible with a view of such pluractionals as yielding grouped, singular events (following Wood's and Tovena & Kihm's view).
The examination of the Hebrew data contributes to the cross linguistic and theoretical research of pluractionality by supporting certain theories over others (e.g. Wood's 2007 and Tovena & Kihm's 2008 view of event internal pluractionality, over Lasersohn's 1995 view), by questioning existing views about pluractionality (e.g. van Geenhoven's 2004 claim that pluractionality inherently leads to atelicity) and by highlighting some of the open issues and unanswered questions that the study of pluractionality faces.
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Negative -š in Palestinian (and Cairene) Arabic: Present and possible past
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- This article investigates the pre-history of the development in Palestinian Arabic, and to a lesser extent in Cairene Arabic, of purely postverbal negation expressed by the morpheme -š, from an earlier bipartite construction mā...-š. On the basis of existing grammatical descriptions and original grammaticality data collected by the author, two distinct and rather idiosyncratic patterns of restrictions on the innovative construction emerge in the two dialects. The irregularity of these patterns in turn provides the basis for a reconstruction of the changes that brought about this construction in each case, but ensured it remains ungrammatical in a range of syntactic, morphological and phonological contexts in which the bipartite construction is fully grammatical. Both theoretical considerations and empirical evidence of the difficulty of acquiring these restrictions lead finally to a tentative prediction of the further spread of the purely postverbal negative construction as the restrictions in question are gradually eliminated.
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Peripheral vowels in Tashlhiyt Berber are phonologically long: Evidence from Tagnawt, a secret language used by women
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- An outstanding issue in Tashlhiyt Berber phonology is the status of the short central vowel (schwa) that appears in certain consonant clusters, and its relation to the remaining (peripheral) vowels in the language. We show that within Tagnawt, a secret language in Tashlhiyt Berber used by women, peripheral vowels are underlyingly long, in that they connect to two skeletal positions. They become unassociated when they have access to only one position. Then, depending on phonotactic conditions, this skeletal position remains empty or surfaces as schwa. In particular, it is demonstrated that Tagnawt formations are all built upon a fixed-shape template fundamentally designed to accommodate three root-consonants. Accordingly, when the Tashlhiyt input is quadriconsonantal, one root-consonant is regularly discarded. In certain cases, however, all four consonants are maintained, except that a schwa systematically appears in one of the vocalic positions where the vowel a normally surfaces. This cannot be accounted for unless the proposal on the representation of peripheral vowels and schwa is assumed.
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Infinitival Superlatives: English vs. Modern Hebrew
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- This paper investigates some semantic and syntactic properties of infinitival relative clauses in superlative expressions (“infinitival superlatives”). In the course of this investigation, more general theoretical issues pertaining to the syntax and semantics of relative clauses in general are addressed, as well as the semantics of superlatives and of tense. The semantics of infinitival superlatives is accounted for by the assumption that the superlative morpheme takes an event argument bound by the matrix tense. It is also observed that not all languages have infinitival superlatives, and that not all the languages that have them admit them in the same constructions. It is proposed that these cross-linguistic differences are due to a difference in the syntactic status of the superlative morpheme.
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Coreferential Dative Constructions in Syrian Arabic and Modern Hebrew
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- In this paper we will provide a description of what we term here the Coreferential Dative Construction. The languages under consideration are Syrian Arabic, which has never been studied before from this respect, and Modern Hebrew. We will show that this construction, related to other constructions containing non-selected datives, expresses the speaker's stance or emotional attitude towards the described eventuality by seeing it as having weak relevance. We will also show that the most important grammatical difference between the two languages is that in Syrian Arabic the presence of the Coreferential Dative obligatorily triggers a special type of modification in the VP: it must be modified by an attenuative vague measure. The comparative approach will help to shed new light on previous analyses of Modern Hebrew data.
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