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On Verbal Numbers in Arabic: Preliminary Remarks

Summary

The paper asks whether Arabic has verbal number, meaning grammatical marking of how many times an event happens rather than how many people take part in it. Number in Semitic is usually treated as a purely nominal category, so this question has been understudied. Al-Sharkawi argues that Classical/Modern Standard Arabic passes the typological diagnostics used for languages with verbal number. He identifies form II, the stem with a doubled second root consonant, as the morphological carrier. He tests this on Modern Standard Arabic minimal pairs and on form II tokens from the Qur'an, and checks his readings against medieval lexical and grammatical sources. Form II signals event plurality only under specific conditions. When those conditions fail, it marks intensity, transitivity or causation, which the paper calls transfer of agency. Verbal number in Arabic therefore depends on morphology and verb meaning together. It concerns events only, never the number of participants. The study gives typologists a Semitic case and a precise account of when form II means repetition.

Key points

  • Form II marks event number only when three conditions hold:
    • the root also has a form I,
    • that form I carries the transitive meaning,
    • the root denotes an instantaneous (punctual) action.
  • Minimal pairs keep the agent and object singular, so any plurality must come from the event. Examples are kasara / kassara ("broke" vs "broke more than once") and nafaxa / naffaxa.
  • When form II comes from a durative or intransitive base, it is causative and implies no repetition. The example is xaraǧa ("left") vs xarraǧa ("sent out").
  • Two tables list Qur'an tokens with repeated-action form II:
    • Table 1 has 5 tokens, e.g. Q28:4 ḏabbaḥa "massacre".
    • Table 2 has 6 tokens, e.g. Q2:176 nazzala. In these cases the causative meaning is expressed separately by form IV, e.g. 'anzala.
    • Readings were checked with lisān and al-Baḥr.
  • The paper claims a stable correlation: when form II expresses number, it does not express transfer of agency. A "many actors / many victims" reading comes from plural arguments, not from the stem. The PDF header gives Folia Orientalia LVI (2019), DOI 10.24425/for.2019.130714.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Count events and count participants as two separate dimensions, because a plural reading can come either from the verb form or from a plural noun phrase, and mixing them causes ambiguity.
  • I2. Use minimal pairs where everything else is held singular, so the only thing that varies is the form being tested.
  • I3. The same morphology means different things depending on the verb's lexical class: punctual verbs get an iterative reading, while durative ones get another function.
  • I4. A form becomes free to carry one meaning when a competing form already covers the other meaning, much as form IV takes over the causative from form II.
  • I5. Interpretive judgments are cross-checked against independent reference works rather than trusting one reading alone.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Store event multiplicity (once vs repeatedly) as its own attribute of an event node, separate from the cardinality of its argument entities, so "knocked on the doors" and "kept knocking on the door" produce different worlds.
  • I2 (learn): Build evaluation sets of minimal pairs that differ only in an iterative marker (e.g. "hit" vs "kept hitting") with singular arguments, as controls showing which component actually produces the plurality reading.
  • I3 (frames): When assigning interpretations to English progressive or "keep V-ing" constructions, condition on a punctual/durative class of the verb (derivable from VerbNet classes), so "was coughing" is read as iterative and "was sleeping" as continuous.
  • I4 (world): In the compiled verb lexicon, record which alternative lexemes exist for a function (e.g. "raise" vs "rise"), so a derived reading is chosen partly by checking which rival form would have been used instead.
  • I5 (learn): Treat dictionaries and lexical resources as extra witnesses when labelling silver data for verb semantics, and accept a label only when several sources agree.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Semitic languages

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Wayne State University.

Cite

Cite as Muhammad Al-Sharkawi. 2019. On Verbal Numbers in Arabic: Preliminary Remarks. Folia Orientalia 56.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.24425/for.2019.130714

@inproceedings{alsharkawi2019verbal,
  title = {{On Verbal Numbers in Arabic: Preliminary Remarks}},
  author = {Muhammad Al-Sharkawi},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 56},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.24425/for.2019.130714},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2019.130714}
}

References

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

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