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<Paper uid="E91-1016">
  <Title>A LOGICAL APPROACH TO !ARABIC PHONOLOGY</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> There is an increasingly widespread view that linguistic behaviour results from the complex interaction of multiple sources of partial information. This is exemplified by the rapidly growing body of work on natural language syntax and semantics such as the Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms. Similarly, in phonology there is a popular view of phonological representations as having the same topology as a spiral-bound notebook, where segments (or slots) axe strung out along the spine and each page gives a structural description of that suing according to some descriptive vocabulary. Crucially only those segmental strings which are licensed by all of the independent descriptions are acceptable.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The practical difficulty is tO come up with a model of grammatical organization which allows the right information to be brought to bear at the right stage. One model which looks particularly attractive in this regard considers the traditional modules of grammar (i.e. syntax, semantics and phonology) not in series where the output of one feeds into the input of the next, but rather in parallel, where each module exerts independent constraints. For example, a morpheme may be represented as a complex consisting of a semantic expression, a constraint on (morpho)syntactic distribution, and a phonological description. The combination of morphemes is then subject to three independent calculi, one per domain. The result is a compositional account of the relationship between form and meaning, as evidenced in the work of Bach (1983), Hoeksema &amp; Janda (1988) and Wheeler (1988). However, all these proposals have assumed that phonological representations are merely linear I We are indebted to Mike Reape, Ewan Klein and members of the Edinburgh Applied Logic group for discussions of the material presented here. We are grateful for the support of ESPRIT Basic Research Action 3175 (DYANA) and SERC post-doctoral fellowship B/ITF/255.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> sequences of segments. Such a restriction renders a theory incapable of expressing the observations which have been made in the non-linear phonology literature (e.g. Goldsmith 1990). Bird &amp; Klein (1990) and Bird (1990) have endeavoured m show how the compositional approach can be liberated from a purely linear segmental view of phonology.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper exemplifies and extends those proposals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The first section presents a logical language for phonological description. The second section shows how it has sufficient expressive power to encompass a variety of observations about syllable structure. The final section discusses further observations which can be made about Arabic syllable structure, and provides an illustrative treatment of so-called non-concatenative morphology in the perfect tense 'verb paradigm.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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