Consonant Spreading in Arabic Stems

This paper examines the phenomenon of consonant spreading in Arabic stems. Each spreading involves a local surface copying of an underlying consonant, and, in certain phonological contexts, spreading alternates productively with consonant lengthening (or gemination). The morphophonemic triggers of spreading lie in the patterns or even in the roots themselves, and the combination of a spreading root and a spreading pattern causes a consonant to be copied multiple times. The interdigitation of Arabic stems and the realization of consonant spreading are formalized using finite-state morphotactics and variation rules, and this approach has been successfully implemented in a large-scale Arabic morphological analyzer which is available for testing on the Internet.

[1]  L. Karttunen.  Finite-state Constraints , 1993 .

[2]  Martin Kay,et al.  Nonconcatenative Finite-State Morphology , 1987, EACL.

[3]  Kimmo Koskenniemi,et al.  Finite-state description of Semitic morphology: a case study of ancient Accadian , 1988, COLING.

[4]  John J. McCarthy,et al.  A prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology , 1981 .

[5]  Clive Holes,et al.  Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties , 1996 .

[6]  Kimmo Koskenniemi,et al.  A General Computational Model for Word-Form Recognition and Production , 1984, ACL.

[7]  Kenneth R. Beesley.  Arabic Finite-State Morphological Analysis and Generation , 1996, COLING.

[8]  Lauri Karttunen,et al.  Two-level rule compiler , 1992 .

[9]  Kenneth R. Beesley.  Arabic Stem Morphotactics via Finite-State Intersection , 1999 .

[10]  George Anton Kiraz.  Multi-Tape Two-Level Morphology: A Case Study in Semitic Non-linear Morphology , 1994, COLING.

[11]  J. M. Cowan,et al.  A dictionary of modern written Arabic , 1963 .

[12]  A. F. L. Beeston,et al.  Written Arabic: An Approach to the Basic Structures@@@The Arabic Language Today , 1974 .

[13]  Zellig S. Harris,et al.  Linguistic Structure of Hebrew , 1941 .

[14]  G. Hudson.  Arabic root and pattern morphology without tiers , 1986 .

[15]  Martin Kay,et al.  Regular Models of Phonological Rule Systems , 1994, CL.

[16]  Lauri Karttunen,et al.  Finite-state lexicon compiler , 1993 .

[17]  Lauri Karttunen,et al.  Two-Level Morphology with Composition , 1992, COLING.

[18]  George Anton Kiraz.  Computing Prosodic Morphology , 1996, COLING.

[19]  Patrick Blackburn,et al.  A Logical Approach to Arabic Phonology , 1991, EACL.