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The inadequacy of the consonantal root: Modern Hebrew denominal verbs and output–output correspondence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2002

Adam Ussishkin
Adam Ussishkin
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Abstract

Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are known for what has become characterised as their discontiguous or non-concatenative morphology. In the overwhelming majority of the literature, in both ‘traditional’ and generative grammar, semantically related words in such languages are described as sharing a common ROOT, usually consisting of three consonants. Such consonantal roots are viewed as actual morphemes with lexical status. Words are formed by affixation to roots; the most common type of such affixation is the interleaving of vowels between the consonants of a root. Within current phonology, the morphological status of roots was originally expressed through a multi-tiered representation, where a root occupied a distinguished tier (e.g. McCarthy 1979, 1981). More recently the notion of root has been challenged by Bat- El (1994a), who argues, based on properties of the process of denominal verb formation (DVF) in Modern Hebrew (MH), that the concept of root can be eliminated.

In this paper, I present further arguments that there is no need to refer to roots in the process of DVF in MH. I also show that under such a view a unified, comprehensive treatment of DVF in MH is possible within Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993). This analysis goes beyond that originally presented in Bat-El (1994a), in that it has the power to predict the surface pattern of biliteral denominal verbs, whose outputs exhibit variation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , December 1999 , pp. 401 - 442
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper has greatly benefited from the help of many people. Junko Itô, Armin Mester and Jaye Padgett have provided comments on numerous drafts, and I wish to offer them my sincere gratitude and appreciation for their helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to Judith Aissen for her detailed comments on a previous draft of this paper. In addition, I would like to thank Gene Buckley, Edit Doron, Sharon Rose, Donca Steriade, Bernard Tranel, Rachel Walker and Andrew Wedel, who have all provided very thoughtful questions, discussions and suggestions with respect to the issues under consideration here. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the many native speakers I have worked with as informants in Santa Cruz, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Danny Buchholz, Edit Doron, Rachel Giora, Shulamit Kuriansky, Na'ama Langholz, Noga Langholz, Gil Rilov, Ilan Yaniv, Keren Yaniv and Oded Yaniv. Various versions of this paper have been presented at the 4th Southwestern Optimality Theory Conference, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the 14th Annual Meeting of the Israel Association of Theoretical Linguistics, and I thank the audiences there for many useful questions, comments and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Phonology for their useful comments, suggestions and advice, and Outi Bat-El and two anonymous Phonology reviewers, whose questions and comments have been quite valuable, and whose input has aided in clarifying many issues discussed here. Any errors are, of course, my own.