Sabrina Bendjaballah
CNRS, France

Apophonic theory in phonology and morphology

This course is concerned with apophonic phenomena, i.e., context-free vowel alternations that express a grammatical opposition. Well-known cases of apophonic alternations are vowel alternations in English or German strong verbs (e.g. English, present: sing, preterite: sang, past participle: sung) and vowel alternations between perfective and imperfective forms in Classical Arabic (e.g. perfective: katab-a, imperfective: ya-ktub, "write, 3ms"). Apophonic alternations are reputed to be unpredictable and as such fully lexicalized: both vowels involved in an apophonic alternation have to be lexicalized. The aim of this course is (a) to show that in certain cases this "irregularity" can be reduced (building on work by Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996) and (b) to evaluate the implications of this result on the role of apophony in the morphology of the examined languages (mainly Afro-Asiatic, possibly Indo-European).

The course will be organized as follows.

week 1
1. Apophony theory: data and analyses
We will first examine apophonic phenomena in three Afro-Asiatic languages (Classical Arabic, Berber and Akkadian) and in two Indo-European languages (German and Spanish).
In their analysis of the Classical Arabic verbal system, Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996 propose that the two vowels involved in an apophonic alternation are related by a derivation. This derivation has the following shape: 0 (zero) -> i -> a -> u -> u (Apophonic Path). According to this analysis, the derived term of an apophonic alternation is unambiguously predictable on the basis of the source term. Only the source term needs to be lexicalized. An examination of various apophonic systems - Berber (Bendjaballah in press), Akkadian (Ségéral 1998), German (Ségéral & Scheer 1998) and Spanish (Boyé 2000) - reveals that the Apophonic Path is also active in these languages. This suggests that the Apophonic Path is a universal mechanism.

week 2
2. Apophony and morphology
Apophonic alternations are cases of non-concatenative morphology: a grammatical opposition is expressed via a vowel alternation. Among others, this basic observation defines two questions.
- Apophony has been argued to play a role in (a) languages that have clearly a templatic morphology (Semitic), (b) languages that are less clearly templatic (Berber, Chadic, Cushitic) and (c) languages usually defined as non-templatic (German, Spanish). We know that templatic languages make use of concatenative morphology, and it seems that languages with non-templatic structures have a templatic activity in some parts of their grammars. We will try to precise in what sense the division ´templatic vs. non-templatic languages´ should be maintained.
- The second question is more specifically concerned with Afro-Asiatic morphology. Recent work (mainly in Optimality Theory) argue in favor of a word-to-word approach to Semitic viz. Afro-Asiatic morphology: it is argued that in these languages, there is no consonantal root, and words are derived from fully-formed words. We will explore the type of evidence that Apophonic Theory provides on the issue. More generally, we will review different types of evidence in favor of a root-based model of Afro-Asiatic morphology: in which way does the assumption of an abstract consonantal root make it possible to get rid of the heavy apparatus that is required when one has to derive words from fully-formed words? We will also examine facts coming from language games and aphasia.

References:
Bendjaballah, Sabrina (in press). The negative preterite in Kabyle Berber.
Folia Linguistica 34, 3-4. Berlin: Mouton.
Boyé, Gilles 2000. Problèmes de morpho-phonologie verbale en francais, en espagnol et en italien. PhD thesis.
Université Paris 7.
Guerssel, Mohand & Jean Lowenstamm 1996. Ablaut in Classical Arabic measure I active verbal forms.
In: Lecarme, Jacqueline, Jean Lowenstamm & Ur Shlonsky (eds): Studies in Afroasiatic Grammar. 123-134. The Hague: HAG.
Prunet, Jean-François, Renée Béland & Ali Idrissi 2000. The mental representation of Semitic words.
Linguistic Inquiry 31-4. 609-648.
Ségéral, Philippe 2000. Théorie de l´apophonie et organisation des schèmes en sémitique.
In: Lecarme, Jacqueline, Jean Lowenstamm & Ur Shlonsky (eds): Research in Afroasiatic Grammar.
263-299. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer 1998. A generalized theory of Ablaut: the case of Modern German
strong verbs. In: Fabri, Ray, Albert Ortmann & Teresa Parodi (eds): Models of Inflection. 28-59.
Tuebingen: Niemeyer.