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

AlQahtani, Saleh; Al-Mufarrej, Norah

doi:10.21608/bflt.2021.204324

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

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Saleh AlQahtani ¹
Norah Al-Mufarrej ²

¹ Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies, College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

² College of Languages and Translation, Women campus, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

10.21608/bflt.2021.204324

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.

Keywords