Lindley Winchester

OF THESIS EGYPTIAN ARABIC PLURALS IN THEORY AND COMPUTATION This paper examines the plural inflectional processes present in Egyptian Arabic, with specific focus on the complex broken plural system. The data used in this examination is a set of 114 lexemes from a dictionary of the Egyptian Arabic variety by Badawi and Hinds (1984) collected through comparison of singular to plural template correspondences proposed by Gadalla (2004). The theoretical side of this analysis tests the proposed realizational approach in Kihm (2006) named the “Root-and-Site Hypothesis” against a variety of broken plural constructions in Egyptian Arabic. Categorizing concatenative and non-concatenative morphological processes as approachable in the same manner, this framework discusses inflection as not only represented by segments but also by “sites” where inflectional operations may take place. In order to organize the data through a computational lens, I emulate features of this approach in a DATR theore...

This paper continues the ongoing debate regarding restrictions on contextual allomorphy within Distributed Morphology. Using evidence from Modern Standard Arabic, it is argued that morphosyntactic features must be capable of conditioning inwardly-sensitive contextual allomorphy to account for the data. Thus, this analysis provides evidence against the restrictions Bobaljik (2000) claims for inward sensitivity as well as the Rewriting assumption, whereby the insertion of Vocabulary Items uses up morphosyntactic features. As such, the analysis supports the need to reference morphosyntactic features after their realization and aligns itself with other works that do so, including Harizanov & Gribanova (2014).

This squib proposes an analysis of adjectival agreement in Modern Standard Arabic in the Distributed Morphology framework. Building on Baier (2015)'s analysis of the same phenomenon in Noon, I argue for a split approach to agreement and concord features. Gender and number features are treated as agreement features shared in the syntax through Bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008) while definiteness features are concord features shared through Morphological Feature Copying and AGR node insertion at PF (Norris 2014). Where this analysis differs from Baier (2015) is the inclusion of case features. In an analysis of copular sentences in Modern Standard Arabic, it is argued that case features are manipulated both in the syntax through case assignment and at PF as a concord feature. Case and definiteness features pattern similarly as concord features in that Feature Copying predicts their agreement in attributive but not predicative contexts. In predicative contexts, case differs from definiteness in that, when a case assigning head is present, it values the adjective's case feature. In contexts where case assignment does not occur, the case feature is realized as a default Vocabulary Item like definiteness. Overall, this squib distinguishes three distinct feature sets operating in adjectival agreement in Modern Standard Arabic and provides evidence for the division of agreement and concord features in language derivation.