Laura Kalin
(Princeton University)

Decomposing vowel melodies: The morphology and syntax of root-and-pattern systems

Root-and-pattern morphology is a linguistic phenomenon where the lexical content of a word appears to consist mostly or entirely of consonants (the “root”), while functional content is contributed mainly by vowels (the “vocalic melody”) which interleave with the root consonants in a particular prosodic shape. Root-and-pattern morphology—with its myriad quirks at every level of description—has long intrigued phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, and semanticists alike. The overarching generative project in modeling root-and-pattern systems has been to understand them as arising from independently necessary mechanisms of the grammar. (For a recent overview, see Kastner and Tucker forthcoming.)

I start from the perspective of a syntax-based approach to morphology where the basic units of syntax are morphemes, as in the framework of Distributed Morphology. This perspective leads to the expectation that words, like larger linguistic expressions, are built out of (morpho)syntactically discrete pieces combined in a hierarchical structure, with a compositional semantic interpretation on the one hand and a phonological form produced by concatenation on the other.

With the concatenative expectation in mind, there are two discontinuities in root-and-pattern systems to contend with: (i) the apparent discontinuity of the root consonants, and (ii) the apparent discontinuity of the vowel melody. While the root discontinuity has (in my opinion, at least!) been successfully addressed in the literature in a variety of ways, the vowel discontinuity has not: nearly all approaches, across frameworks, maintain that the vowel melody corresponds to a single morpheme whose multiple segments end up discontinuous from each other due to some special (and not particularly generalizable) phonological mechanism.

In this talk, I pursue a syntax-based approach to root-and-pattern morphology that aims to solve the apparent discontinuity of vowel melodies by decomposing them into multiple distinct morphemes: each vowel expones a distinct syntactic head. If this approach is on the right track, then in fact there is no discontinuity intrinsic to the vowel melody at all. I further suggest that both infixation and ablaut are promising avenues to explore for accounting for how each individual vowel gets linearized in its surface (intra-root) position.

Of course, the devil is in the details. I will first analyze a snippet of Hebrew verbal morphology, building on related approaches to this data by Faust (2012) and Kastner (2019, 2020). I show how my proposal uniquely illuminates the formation of five “binyanim” (including their inflected forms) from a shared underlying syntactic structure while capturing individual vowel distributions. On the heels of these promising results, I apply this decompositional approach to three other root-and-pattern systems, within the Semitic language group and without.

References

Faust, Noam. 2012. Non-concatenative realization in the verbal inflection of Modern Hebrew. Morphology 22:453–484.

Kastner, Itamar. 2019. Templatic morphology as an emergent property: Roots and functional heads in Hebrew. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 37:571–619.

Kastner, Itamar. 2020. Voice at the interfaces: The syntax, semantics and morphology of the Hebrew verb. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Kastner, Itamar, and Matt Tucker. To appear. Non-concatenative Morphology. In Cambridge Handbook of Distributed Morphology, eds. Artemis Alexiadou, Ruth Kramer, Alec Marantz, Isabel Oltra-Massuet. Cambridge: CUP.