Monday Colloquium: Decomposition and infixation: A new approach to root and pattern morphology in Modern Hebrew (Laura Kalin; Princeton University)

Talk Abstract: Root and pattern morphology is a linguistic phenomenon where the lexical root of a word appears to consist just of consonants (the “consonantal root”), while functional content is contributed by a series of vowels (the “vocalic melody”), which appear to interleave with the root consonants in a particular skeletal pattern (the “template”). Particularly in the Semitic context, root and pattern morphology—with its myriad quirks at every level of description—has long puzzled phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, and semanticists alike. Some interconnected questions that arise include: (i) is the root morpheme really purely consonantal, or is it stored with an (unmarked) vocalic melody?, (ii) is the template separable from the vocalic melody, and if so, is the template on its own a linguistic object (i.e., a morpheme), or is it epiphenomenal?, (iii) how/why does the vocalic melody end up interleaved with the root, and is this a matter purely of phonology, or does it belong to the domain of morphology?, and (iv) is there syntactic and semantic regularity to be found in the melody and/or template, or do these exponents correspond more to something like theme vowels, stemming from arbitrary lexical classes?  

While the above questions have all received a fair bit of attention in the literature, a question that has received rather little attention is whether the vocalic melody itself is decomposable into multiple morphemes, i.e., whether the first vowel and the second vowel might correspond to different morphemes. Most work on root and pattern morphology simply assumes the vocalic melody is not decomposable (e.g., McCarthy 1981, Aronoff 1994, Doron 2003, Arad 2005, Borer 2013, Kastner 2019, 2020). In this talk, I use a case study of Modern Hebrew verbs to explore the (very out-there) idea that in fact the vocalic melody IS decomposable, building on and extending ideas in Faust 2012. I consider the empirical motivation for this decomposition and propose a particular theoretical implementation, based on Kastner’s (2019, 2020) syntactic decomposition of Hebrew verbs. I then consider the empirical and theoretical consequences of this implementation, in particular with respect to the possibility that infixation plays a central role in root and pattern morphology. This work is in its very early stages, and all feedback is welcome.