Arabic morphology: diminutive verbs and diminutive nouns in San’ani Arabic

Abstract

Word formation in Arabic has traditionally been assumed to involve interdigitation of a consonantal root with a vocalic pattern. This view is adopted by a large number of modern generative morphologists. More recently, however, several morphologists have argued that words in Semitic are formed from fully vocalised stems. In this paper, I argue that in San'ani (the dialect of San'a), and in some other Arabic dialects, there is a class of verbs that have as part of either their denotations or connotations a diminutive sense. I then consider diminutive nouns in the dialect. On the basis of semantic and phonological relationships between diminutive verbs and their non-diminutive counterparts, as well as native speakers' explanations of certain diminutive verbs, and the relationship between diminutive nouns and their non-diminutive counterparts, I argue that while some derivational processes take the root as the basic morphological unit, phonological and semantic similarities between certain stems can only be accounted for by derivation from a fully vocalised stem. I therefore conclude that both root-based and stem-based types of word formation occur.

Are there transfer effects in the Arabic comparative?

“…In this paper, after reviewing the role of transfer effects in the Arabic broken plural in Section 2, I will discuss the Arabic comparative in Section 3 providing argumentation that the Arabic comparative, unlike the broken plural (and diminutive) shows no transfer effects from a base word, and, consequently, constitutes a root-based morphological process. In Section 4, I briefly discuss the implication of our finding concluding in agreement with Watson (2006), Idrissi et al (2008) and Benmamoun (2016) that Arabic allows for both word-based and root-based morphological derivation.…”

“…On the other hand, other instantiations of Arabic templatic morphology, such as the broken plural discussed in Section 2, are wordbased since their realization shows transfer effects from a base. There may be an emerging view that Arabic morphology can be both word-based and root-based (Watson, 2006;Idrissi et al, 2008;Benmamoun, 2016) and the question is what types of morphology are likely to be word-based showing transfer effects and which are likely to be root-based. I leave these matters for future research.…”

Various Forms and Meanings of Diminutive in Classical and Modern Arabic

“…Arabic by Watson Janet (2006) 4 .Like the previous work, this article reviews the Arabic Amiyah dialect of San"ani, Yemen. One focus of this paper is to discuss diminutive verbs in the San'ani dialect Arabic.…”

Lamunkhin Even evaluative morphology in cross-linguistic comparison

“…In recent decades, the morphological and semantic features of evaluative morphology have been the focus of intense research (see, among many others, Stump 1993;Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994;Jurafsky 1996;Bauer 1997;Schneider 2003;Prieto 2005;Watson 2006; Körtvélyessy and Štekauer 2011;Fortin 2011;Spasovski 2012;di Garbo 2014;Grandi and Körtvélyessy 2015;Körtvélyessy 2015a;Ponsonnet and Vuillermet in preparation). A clear cross-linguistic tendency that has emerged from this research is that diminutives are more widespread than augmentatives, with the implication that if a language has augmentatives, it will also have diminutives, but not vice versa.…”