Kreisfreie Stadt Leipzig, Alemania
Les morfologies de la llengua semítica s’han descrit sovint com un sistema d’arrels i patrons (roots and patterns) que suggereixen una arrel pluriconsonàntica. Per exemple, l’arrel àrab putativa √qbr té les formes derivades qabara ‘va enterrar’, qubira ‘va ser enterrat’, ʔaqburu ‘enterro’, qabr ‘tomba’ (pl. qubūr) i maqbar ‘cementiri’ (pl. maqābir). Tant la investigació tradicional semitista com la basada en morfemes generatius assumeixen arrels pluriconsonàntiques. Tanmateix, hi ha hagut intents d’explicar la morfologia d’arrel i patró mitjançant l’apofonia. En aquests relats, l’anomenada Melodic Overwriting planteja el mecanisme morfofonològic pel qual les vocals internes de la paraula queden sobreescrites per afixos vocalics. Els enfocaments contraris s’han utilitzat per defensar diferents models de morfologia (root-based vs. stem-/word-based), barrejant la teoria morfològica amb les representacions fonològiques. En aquest article, es proposa una nova teoria de la morfologia d’arrel i patró. Es mostra que les arrels pluriconsonàntiques s’enfronten a diversos problemes teòrics i empírics que es resolen assumint arrels vocalitzades d’una manera similar als enfocaments basats en la base i la paraula, però aprofitant els avantatges dels marcs basats en morfemes.
The morphologies of Semitic languages have most often been described as a system of roots and patterns suggesting a pluri-consonantal root. For example, the putative Arabic root √qbr has the derived forms qabara ‘he buried’, qubira ‘he was buried’, ʔaqburu ‘I bury’, qabr ‘grave’ (pl. qubūr), and maqbar ‘cemetery’ (pl. maqābir). Both traditional Semitist and generative morpheme- based research assume pluri-consonantal roots. However, there have been attempts to explain root-and-pattern morphology in terms of apophony instead. In these accounts, so-called Melodic Overwriting provides the morphophonological mechanism by which word-internal vowels are overwritten by vocalic affixes. The contrary approaches have been used to argue for different models of morphology (root-based vs. word-/stem-based), intermingling morphological theory with phonological representations. In this paper, a new theory of root-and-pattern morphology is proposed. It is shown that pluri-consonantal roots face several theoretical and empirical problems which are solved by assuming vocalised roots in a similar way to stem- and word-based approaches, but with the advantages of morpheme-based frameworks.