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Traditional Roots and Contemporary Syntax in Semitic Morphology| old_uid | 13212 |
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| title | Traditional Roots and Contemporary Syntax in Semitic Morphology |
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| start_date | 2017/02/20 |
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| schedule | 10h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The non-concatenative morphology of languages such as Hebrew and Arabic has often been used as a testing ground for theories of morphology. This is because in these languages, consonantal “roots” are interleaved with melodic “templates” in a way that is very different from concatenative morphology, at least on the surface. In this talk I sketch a theory of the Hebrew verb which doubles as a general theory of verbal morphology, couched within Distributed Morphology.
Specifically, I argue that lexical roots combine with syntactic functional heads, not with templatic morphemes. Templates then emerge as a side effect of how the general phonology of the language constrains the linearization of morphemes. This analysis improves on previous accounts of root-and-pattern morphology by paying attention to the syntax, the semantics and the phonology at the same time. As a consequence, the Semitic root is argued to be analogous to lexical roots in other languages, storing idiosyncratic phonological and semantic information but obeying the syntactic structure in which it is embedded. |
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| responsibles | Soare, Cabredo Hofherr |
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