Intra-Paradigmatic Contrast in Arabic Verbal Morphology

Arabic verbs exhibit a morphologically conditioned stem ablaut which has been attributed in the past to an apophonic scale (Guerssel and Lowenstamm 1996; Ségéral 1997). I show here that this apophonic scale is unnecessary, and that Arabic ablaut can be attributed instead to maximized contrast along the dimension of morphosyntactic aspect, employing constraints motivated by Rebrus and Törkenczy 2005. The choice of ablaut vowel has already been shown to depend most directly upon vocalic height features (Brame 1970; McOmber 1993), and therefore my analysis hinges on constraints demanding faithfulness to the feature [high]. Other vowel feature faithfulness constraints must be more highly ranked.