A Logical Approach to Arabic Phonology

A LOGICAL APPROACH TO !ARABIC PHONOLOGY Steven Bird & Patrick Blackburn University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland steven@cogs ci. ed. ac. uk, patrick@cogsci, ed. ae. uk ABSTRACT Logical approaches to linguistic description, particu- larly those which employ feature structures, have generally treated phonology as though it was the same as orthography. This approach breaks down for languages where the phono- logical shape of a morpheme can be heavily dependent on the phonological shape of another, as is the case in Ara- bic. In this paper we show how the tense logical approach investigated by Blackburn (1989) can be used to encode hierarchical and temporal phonological information of the kind explored by Bird (1990). Then we show how some Arabic morphemes may be represented and combined t . INTRODUCTION There is an increasingly widespread view that linguis- tic behaviour results from the complex interaction of mul- tiple 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 Gram- mar 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 de- scriptive vocabulary. Crucially only those segmental strings which are licensed by all of the independent descriptions are acceptable. The practical difficulty is tO come up with a model of grammatical organization which allows the right informa- tion 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, seman- tics 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 dis- tribution, 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 & Janda (1988) and Wheeler (1988). However, all these proposals have as- sumed 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 ma- terial presented here. We are grateful for the support of ESPRIT Basic Research Action 3175 (DYANA) and SERC post-doctoral fellowship B/ITF/255. 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 & Klein (1990) and Bird (1990) have endeav- oured m show how the compositional approach can be lib- erated from a purely linear segmental view of phonology. This paper exemplifies and extends those …

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