Noun plurals showing partial reduplication appear sporadically in a wide variety of Afroasiatic languages, particularly in the Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic groups. In past treatments it has generally been assumed that these examples are remnants of a widespread proto-Afroasiatic process of plural formation by reduplication. The following paper argues on empirical and theoretical grounds that it is more likely that reduplication as such was not a means of plural formation in proto-Afroasiatic and that a reduplicated plural only occurred as a morpho-phonologically conditioned variant of the prosodically extended stem (or ‘nternal-a’) plural. This paper seeks to demonstrate that in those languages where reduplication does occur as a major means of plural formation it is more easily interpreted as an innovation rather than as a conservative retention.
This article discusses the study of Arabic morphology. It first considers the root-and-pattern theory, which has become the orthodox approach to Arabic synchronic morphology. It then details the paradigm shift in the mid-1980s, when students of Arabic morphology reached the conclusion that a rigidly reductionist root-and-pattern analysis is fundamentally inadequate as a descriptive tool. This has led to a variety of alternative models, which can be loosely grouped under the rubric of word based or stem based. All such models have in common the idea that many or all morphological regularities in Arabic can be best described in terms of derivational processes operating on words or stems rather than in terms of combinations of roots and patterns.
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