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204324

Impoverishment And Underspecification To Account For Syncretism Of Arabic Functional Morphemes A Distributed-Morphological Account

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Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

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Abstract

This paper aims to investigate three instances of syncretism in Arabic, namely number, gender, and Case marking. The study argues that syncretism of number values, attested in Verb-subject clauses and modified determiner phrases, can be accounted for by Vocabulary Item underspecification. Similarly, for gender syncretism, the study posits an underspecification rule that deletes the gender feature from the 2nd and 3rd dual pronouns, which results in genderless pronouns that can be used for masculine and feminine simultaneously. The last instance of syncretism is accusative/genitive Case marking. Assuming that Case is decomposed into primitive features, this paper proposes an impoverishment rule that deletes the oblique Case prior to Vocabulary Insertion. The proposed account in this paper relies on Distributed Morphology as a theoretical framework.

DOI

10.21608/bflt.2021.204324

Keywords

Arabic, case, Distributed Morphology, impoverishment, Syncretism, Underspecification

Authors

First Name

Saleh

Last Name

AlQahtani

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies, College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Email

alashry@ksu.edu.sa

City

Riyadh

Orcid

0000-0002-2240-2989

First Name

Norah

Last Name

Al-Mufarrej

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

College of Languages and Translation, Women campus, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Email

439203163@student.ksu.edu.sa

City

-

Orcid

-

Volume

21

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

28808

Issue Date

2021-07-01

Receive Date

2021-11-11

Publish Date

2021-07-01

Page Start

511

Page End

530

Print ISSN

2090-8504

Online ISSN

3009-755X

Link

https://bflt.journals.ekb.eg/article_204324.html

Detail API

https://bflt.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=204324

Order

1

Type

Original Article

Type Code

1,011

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Bulletin of The Faculty of Languages & Translation

Publication Link

https://bflt.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Impoverishment And Underspecification To Account For Syncretism Of Arabic Functional Morphemes A Distributed-Morphological Account

Details

Type

Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023