NOTES ON THE R₁R₂R₃. STEMS IN SEMITIC

Pluractional Verbs: An Overview

“…The classic volume that delves into the subject of verbal plurality is Dressler (1968). The modern linguistic appreciation of the significance of these earlier works and the recognition of verbal plurality as a rich and complex area of study can be said to have begun in the early to mid 1980s with the appearance of an oft-cited Ph.D. dissertation (Cusic 1981) and the publication of a series of influential papers by Bybee (1984Bybee ( , 1985, Frajzyngier (1985), Durie (1986), and Mithun (1988), in all of which disparate examples of verbal plurality were regarded as manifestations of a common phenomenon. More recently, pluractionality has been treated in depth in a still unpublished, firstrate Ph.D. dissertation (Wood 2007).…”

“…Given that the term was first used in Chadic, which is a constituent member of the Afroasiatic phylum, and the fact that the existence of reduplicated verbs connoting iteration, repetition, durativity, and plural action have long been documented in other branches of Afroasiatic, see, for example, Fassi Fehri (2003) and el Zarka (2005) for Arabic, Frajzyngier (1979) for wider Semitic, and Vycichl (1970) for Coptic, it is not surprising that once Afroasiaticists were introduced to the term, they found it to be apt and useful. We thus find "pluractional" having been adopted by scholars working in all branches of Afroasiatic, e.g., Ancient Egyptian (Bendjaballah & Reintges 2009) (Kossmann 2004, Dingemanse 2008.…”

“…To the extent that there is a relationship between pluractional verbs and nominal arguments, it tends to be ergative-like, i.e., the fit is not with the subject as such, but rather with the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitives (see Frajzyngier 1985). Greenberg (1991: 584) speaks of "natural ergativity in plural verbs" [by which he means pluractionals] and in individual languages this is commonly described.…”

“…For example, consider the following reduplicated lexical verbs in Tuareg (Dingemanse 2008), where the pluractional semantics is evident: faratfarat 'sprout up here and there'; fanagfanag 'waddle like a duck'; na-fadfad 'tremble profusely'. And then one can point to the situation in Semitic, where numerous scholars have long surmised that supposedly monomorphemic triconsonantal verb stems with the 2nd and 3rd consonants identical were probably derived plural/pluractional forms (see Frajzyngier 1979 andGreenberg 1991).…”

Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

“…The general phenomenon itself is supported by robust, although inconsistent, evidence across a number of languages. An early example is the observation of Spitta-Bey (1880), 2 that the Arabic language tends to favor combination of consonant segments (phonemes) in morphemes that have different places of articulation; this was also later pointed out by Greenberg (1950) and those Semitic root outliers that deviate from this pattern were analyzed in depth in Frajzyngier (1979). In Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots, which are mostly structured CVC, stop-V-stop combinations have been found to be statistically underrepresented (Iverson and Salmons, 1992).…”