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<Paper uid="P98-1018">
  <Title>Consonant Spreading in Arabic Stems</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="117" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Most formal analyses of Semitic languages, including Arabic, defend the reality of abstract, unpronounceable morphemes called ROOTS, consisting usually of three, but sometimes two or four. consonants called RADICALS. The classic examples include ktb (~. ,D ~)1, appearing in a number of words having to do with writing, books, schools, etc.; and drs (~9 z), appearing in words having to do with studying, learning, teaching, etc. Roots combine nonconcatenatively with PATTERNS to form STEMS, a process known informally as INTERDIGITA-TION or INTERCALATION. We shall look first at Arabic stems in general before examining GEMINATION and SPREADING, related phenomena wherein a single underlying radical is real~The Arabic-script examples in this paper were produced using the ArabTeX package for TEX and DTEX by Prof. Dr. Klaus Lagally of the University of Stuttgart.  ized multiple times in a surface string. Semitic morphology, including stem interdigitation and spreading, is adequately and elegantly formalizable using finite-state rules and operations.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="117" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.1 Arabic Stems
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The stems in Figure 12 share the drs root morpheme, and indeed they are traditionally organized under a drs heading in printed lexicons like the authoritative Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic of Hans Wehr (1979).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> A root morpheme like drs interdigitates with a pattern morpheme, or, in some analyses.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> with a pattern and a separate vocalization morpheme, to form abstract stems. Because interdigitation involves pattern elements being inserted between the radicals of the root morpheme, Semitic stem formation is a classic example of non-concatenative morphotactics.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Separating and identifying the component morphemes of words is of course the core task of morphological analysis for any language, and analyzing Semitic stems is a classic challenge 2The taa~ marbuu.ta, notated here as (t), is the feminine ending pronounced only in certain environments. Long consonants and long vowels are indicated here with gemination.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4">  for any morphological analyzer.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="117" end_page="117" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.2 Interdigitation as Intersection
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Finite-state morphology is based on the claim that both morphotactics and phonological/orthographical variation rules, i.e. the relation of underlying forms to surface forms, can be formalized using finite-state automata (Kaplan and Kay, 1981; Karttunen, 1991; Kaplan and Kay, 1994). Although the most accessible computer implementations (Koskenniemi, 1983; Antworth, 1990; Karttunen, 1993)of finite-state morphotactics have been limited to building words via the concatenation of morphemes, the theory itself does not have this limitation. In Semitic morphotactics, root and pattern morphemes (and, according to one's theory, perhaps separate vocalization morphemes) are naturally formalized as regular languages, and stems are formed by the intersection, rather than the concatenation, of these regular languages. Such analyses have been laid out elsewhere (Kataja and Koskenniemi, 1988; Beesley, 1998a; Beesley, 1998b) and cannot be repeated here. For present purposes, it will suffice to view morphophonemic (underlying) stems as being formed from the intersection of a root and a pattern, where patterns contain vowels and C slots into which root radicals are, intuitively speaking, &amp;quot;plugged&amp;quot;, as in the following Form I per~ct active and passive verb examples.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Root: d r s k t b q t i  in the usual way to form complete, but still morphophonemic, words; and finite-state variation rules are then applied to map the morphophonemic strings into strings of surface phonemes or orthographicM characters. For an overview of this approach, see Karttunen, Kaplan and Zaehen (1992).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Following Harris (1941) and Hudson (1986), and unlike McCarthy (1981), we also allow the patterns to contain non-radical consonants as in the following perfect active Form VII, Form VIII and Form X examples.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Form VII Form VIII Form X Root: k t b k t b kt b Pattern: nCaCaC CtaCaC staCCaC Stem : nkat ab ktatab staktab In this formalization, noun patterns work exactly like verb patterns, as in the following examples: null Root: k t b k t b kt b Pattern: CiCaaC CuCuC maCCuuC Stem: kitaab kutub maktuub Gloss : &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; &amp;quot;books&amp;quot; &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; Where such straightforward intersection of roots and patterns into stems would appear to break down is in cases of gemination and spreading, where a single root radical appears multiple times in a surface stem.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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