A Logical Analysis of Autosegmental Approaches to Root-and-Pattern Morphology in Arabic

What it is about

Jardine (2017) showed that left-to-right association of autosegmental representations of arbitrary length is not definable in monadic second-order logic, which casts doubt on the cognitive plausibility of the autosegmental approach. Payne shows that the finite length of the Arabic consonantal root avoids this problem. She builds a relational model with three tiers (prosodic template, affixes, root) and the precedence relation, adds constraints such as "each C slot links to one element", and writes McCarthy's (1981) analysis of the fifteen binyanim of the root KTB as association transductions in first-order logic. Binyan-specific rules, the flop of reflexive [t] in binyan VIII and the erasure rule for gemination in II, V and XIII, are written as binyan-indexed transductions. The paper is formal; it reports no measurements, and it notes that the result depends on the root being finite, not on its exact length.

Ideas

• I1. Write the binyan-indexed association as a finite table (binyan, template slots, affix position) and apply it in Rust, left to right, with no search. Each generated form then has a traceable chain of associations.
• I2. Hebrew hitpa'el forms have the same t-infix problem as binyan VIII. Write Payne's flop rule as a rule and test it on the hitpa'el forms in MACULA. The paper names Hebrew as a possible extension.
• I3. Use the paper's Table 1 (the root KTB in all fifteen binyanim, in the perfective, imperfective and participle columns) as a closed gold test for any Semitic root-and-pattern generator. The set is small and closed, so a generator either passes it or fails.

For Mova

I1 goes into The verb, as a verb-stem table. I2 goes into The weak verbs. I3 is a test set for the same verb-stem table and for any generator in tools/hbo.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.9

@inproceedings{payne2026logical,
  title = {{A Logical Analysis of Autosegmental Approaches to Root-and-Pattern Morphology in Arabic}},
  author = {Payne, Sarah},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.9}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Muteb Alqarni. 2022. Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 58(3):381–418. find
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