An Analysis of the Inflectional System of Person, Number, and Gender of Verbs in Hijazi Saudi Arabic (HSA)

This study examines person, number, and gender inflections in the past tense forms of Hijazi-Saudi Arabic (HSA) and Hijazi-Classical Arabic (HCA) verbs. It sheds light on the inflectional rules of forming verbs in HSA, an understudied variety of Arabic, adopting an autosegmental approach which highlights the variety’s nonconcatenative nature. Four native speakers of HSA, two females and two males were consulted, in order to provide data. They were given a list of verbs and requested to say the verb versions in HSA. HCA examples follow the morphological rules explained by Abdulhameed (1990) and Putten (2017). The past tense verbs and the passive voice forms in HCA differed from the corresponding forms used in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and HSA: for example, the additional approximant consonants [j, w] at the end of the verb, and the gemination or lack of gemination in various verb positions. It is tempting, although not scientifically sound, to surmise that a language is an antecedent of another when both are spoken in the same region and share one cover term, 'Arabic.' However, this study finds that postulation inaccurate when analysing data in the different language varieties: HCA, MSA, and HSA.


Introduction
Arabic has a regular morphological system primarily rooted in three sounds [qal] 'say'; however, in some verbs there could be four sounds, [zlzl] 'shake', or five, [ʔnTlq] 'start off', or six, [ʔstxrʒ] 'extract'.In addition to these root segments, some sounds are added to inflect different persons, numbers, or genders.Such regularity allowed Arabic morphologists to devise a tool to help analyze the words of the pre-modern standard Arabic varieties and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) into roots and inflections.This tool is called Almizan Alsarfi, literally 'the morphology scale' (Alhamalawi, 1911;Qindeel & Yosef, 2008).This scale is referred to as having a 'dummy verb' whose consonants change to produce prescriptively well-structured verbs.It is also used to check the accuracy of those verbs in Arabic, as utilized in Alhamalawi (1911).This is possible because the structures of verbs in these varieties are largely regular.Moreover, due to the nonconcatenative nature of Arabic, the sounds used to derive verbs are usually included within the sounds of the root, or after, or sometimes before.In nonconcatenative morphology, root sounds are not necessarily strung together when adding affixes (Haspelmath & Sims, 2010): for example, the root ‫'قال'‬ /qala/ say is inflected with the present affix as ‫'يقول'‬ /jaqulu/.
Arabic as a nonconcatenative language provides a rich field for analysis.One possible reason for this morphological phenomenon is that not all Arabic morphemes are explicit, with the different varieties of Arabic and languages' natural evolution adding to the system's complexity.Such complexity manifests itself through variations of inflections in different varieties of Arabic, as some morphemes vary, and some do not exist in all Arabic varieties.For example, the dual morpheme, -a(ta)# as in [qala/qalata], is not used in most of the modern Arabic varieties.In this study, HSA, the Arabic variety spoken in the Western side of the Arabian Peninsula, in the area known as Hijaz, was analyzed in order to create a list of its inflectional morphemes of person, gender, and number.
In MSA, the list of verbs with all the different persons, genders, and numbers was compiled and then each form was matched with a corresponding form in HSA.An analysis of data in MSA and HSA was conducted to determine the different morphemes in these varieties, and how and to what extent they are conventionalized.After extracting all the morphemes, the roots were analyzed to determine how the root system is represented, and what forms of roots are taken in HSA.In addition, some connections were made with the variety of classical Arabic (henceforth HCA) that was spoken in the Western side of the Arabian Peninsula, in the area known as Hijaz.The word 'hijaz' means dividing object or mountain, in reference to the mountainous terrain separating the Tehama plains that extend along the Red Sea from the elevated region of Najd in the centre of Arabia (Alhamadani, 1884;Hamza, 2002;Muhran, 1980).I reconstructed the HCA examples in this study based on the linguistic information presented by Abdulhameed (1990) and Putten (2017).The absence of previous research tackling the morphology of HSA made it necessary to produce new data for this study.HSA data was collected from native speakers.An autosegmental analysis was implemented to analyze this data to ascertain how sounds and morphemes move and appear or disappear in the morphology of HCA and HSA, which are the Arabic varieties spoken in roughly the same area of the Arabian Peninsulanamely, the Hijaz region, more specifically linked to Makkah and its environs -at different periods.HCA has been spoken since the first Hijri year, around 622 AD, and is the language spoken by the Quraish, the main tribe living in Makkah (Muhran, 1980).HSA, on the other hand, is the variety of Arabic spoken by the inhabitants of urban Makkah whose ancestors have not lived in the city's suburbs for the past thirty to one hundred years.The varieties of Arabic spoken by people whose forebears did live in Makkah's suburbs are different from HSA and are not considered in this study.
An autosegmental analysis allows us to capture the circumfixation property of affixes (Lieber, 1984;McCarthy, 1981).For example, Arabic speakers add the feminine, present, and plural morphemes to the verb root [qal] 'said' to become [taquluna] 'say'.Note the inflections attached to the beginning or end of the root and how they affect its middle.Consider the autosegmental representation below.

Participants
Four native speakers of HSA were consulted: two males and two females.One male participant is expected to graduate in a year's time and the other three are BA graduates, all of them have study or are studying at Umm Al-Qura University, in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.The participants reported that they and their parents lived in Makkah for their entire childhood, and thereafter for most of their lives.In addition, they all stated that they went to regular public schools and that most of their friends are also from the Hijaz region.

Methodology
Participants received a list of MSA verbs and were requested to give their equivalent examples from the non-standard, ‫عامية‬ Aamiah, the variety of language that they speak.The questions to elicit the target sentences were versions of the following template, filling the blanks with the different MSA verb roots listed below the question template: Question Template: ‫العامية‬ ‫بلهجتك‬ "...." ‫الكلمة‬ ‫تقول‬ ‫كيف‬ -‫الفصحى؟.‬‫غير‬ ‫اللهجة‬ Literally translated: How do you say the word "…." in your colloquial dialect, the non-Fusha dialect?
The various MSA verbs represented different variations of the following verb roots:

Morpheme tier μ
Root tier q a l Skeletal tier For each of these roots, the following forms were given: first-, second-, and third-person; singular, dual, and plural; passive; and the masculine and feminine of each.These forms are given for comparing the forms in HSA with MSA.Answers were recorded, and then phonetically transcribed.Whenever there was confusion or disagreement in pronunciation, the participants were asked to confirm which pronunciation was the correct one to use.
Based on the data obtained from the participants, I wrote derivation rules for every example following the approach in Bisele and Eisele (2002).

Data Analysis
The HSA morphemes for inflecting person, number, and gender on verbs were analyzed in this study by looking into different variations of the verbs: [qal]

Table 1
The roots of the verbs analyzed in this paper for both the MSA and the HSA varieties of Arabic root MSA HSA qal 'say' gal 'say' bdʔ 'start' sʔl 'ask' ʔxð 'take' ʔxd 'take' xrʒ 'exit' v. zlzl 'shakeearthquake' v.
In HSA Arabic, the first-person singular marker is a final [t].There is no gender distinction for the first-person singular; consider examples and rules (1).
[zalzˈalt] 'shook-as an earthquake 1 st SG' (f) [ʔaexˈət:] 'took 1 st SG' (1) Rules In 'a' to 'e' of (1), the [t] sound that represents the morpheme of the first-person singular verbs comes after the last sound of the root.The phonological process of neutralization (Hayes, 2011) affects the voicing quality of neighboring [d] and [t] sounds.When there is a voiced sound following this cluster, both are voiced and when there is not a voiced sound, neither are voiced.When we pronounce this word out of context, the final coda cluster of [d] and [t] do not precede a voiced sound and we pronounce them both as a long [t] at the end of (1. f).Note how each of the other examples of (1) end with a consonant cluster while (1.f) ends with the gemination [t:].This [t:] is a combination of [d], from the root, and [t] marking the first-person singular where the [d] loses the [+voice] feature and becomes similar to the following voiceless sound [t].In MSA, however, the same root has an interdental [ð] as the coda.Since this interdental is different from [t] in manner, place, and voicing, neutralization is not effected in these instances (Hayes, 2011).
The rules in this section start with an unnumbered line that demonstrates the general rule of derivation.In (1) for example, the general rule of derivation is for the first-person singular past tense verb in HSA.The parentheses indicate optionality, whereas the braces indicate a choice.As noted above, the general marker for the first-person singular is the final morpheme [t], called the [t] of the speaker in Arabic.The choice of vowel to fill the surroundings of the root segments is based on the root type.For the vowel-medial root, rule (a), for example, there is a [ʊ] vowel following the first consonant and no other added vowel because there is a vowel in the root, and it is not necessary to separate the clusters of consonants.The vowel is the core of the syllable in Arabic (Ryding, 2014), and since there are none in the roots of examples (b-f), a vowel is inserted in every syllable of these examples.
The gender distinction between the first-person dual and the first-person plural is not present in HAS, contrary to the case with verbs, adjectives, and pronouns in most modern urban Saudi dialects.The first-person plural masculine inflection is [-nə] attached to the last segment of the root.Interestingly, this inflection is generalized and regularized to include the first-person plural3 , masculine, and feminine, as demonstrated in the list below: Similar to (1), [-nə] exists in all inflections of the dual and plural first-person verbs for the six types of verbs covered in this paper.In addition to the suffix marker [-nə], the differences between inflected verbs in (1) and ( 2) are in the existence or non-existence of the vowels, and what type of vowels they are.A minor difference in (2) compared to (1) is in the vowels surrounding the glottal-initial root, which is [a] in (2) instead of [ae & ə] in (1).The secondperson singular feminine marker is [-ti] as in (3).Again, the geminate /t/ appears in (3.f) for the same reason of (1.f) and shows in all second-person inflections of the verb root, [ʔxd].
The second-person singular masculine marker is [-t], as shown in (4).The comparison of (3) with (4) shows the similarity between the two sets since they are different only in the additional vowel for the feminine marker.
The second-person and plural markers for both genders have one regularized inflection [tu].In (5), all the verbs are inflected with [-tu].
The masculine inflection for the third-person singular is ∅, as demonstrated by the lists of examples and rules given in (7).As this inflection has no surface realization, it is used in Arabic for producing the root.As several Arabic roots have no vowels, the same pronunciation of the third-person singular is the pronunciation used for the utterance that represents the root.For example, when I explain what a root is used for 'said 3 rd SG MASC', I use the word [gˈael].
The third-person plural marker for both genders is the suffix [-u] immediately after the last consonant of the root.Consider the examples and rules in (8).
In HSA, the vowels surrounding the medial position segments of the verb roots are person markers, and the suffixes are gender, number, and person markers as shown in Table 2.

ROOT
The general shape of the verb, excluding the root, marks the past tense.This is determined by comparing the past tense verbs, such as those above, with their equivalents in the present and future tense.Compare Tables 2 and 3.

An illustration of the nonconcatenative morphology in HSA of the present tense verbs derived from the root [xrʒ]
GEN, NUM, PER TENSE (PRESENT) Three-consonants and glottal medial root  2 and 3, the first, second, and final rows in the content section include information linked by lines to different positions, which are occupied by different segments, of the verbs.This manner of representing the gender, number, person, and tense markers indicates the autonomous nature of these markers.That is to say, the roots of the relevant verbs are in one tier, with the markers in another, thus demonstrating the nonlinear association of the root and the attached markers in a nonconcatenative language.
In MSA and HSA, the unmarked past tense verb endings can be a vowel or a consonant [t], marking the feminine or the first-person singular for HSA.However, in HCA, a vowel ending for the past tense verb would be marked.In HCA, the unmarked endings include an approximant consonant [w or j], following and corresponding to the place of the existing vowels, or a long vowel in place of vowels that do not correspond with the two approximants [w and j], as illustrated below.In addition, HCA verbs do not include glottal stops in the rhyme position (Abdulhameed, 1990).This forms part of the root glottal stops.Derivatives of the verb roots, [sʔl] and [bdʔ], are examples for the impermissibility of rhymic4 glottal stop in HCA, (10).Vowel harmony affects vowels of the inflections surrounding and within the roots of all the verbs in the active voice for MSA.Vowel harmony applies to all the verbs in the active voice, in both MSA and HSA, and most verbs in the passive voice of HSA.As regards HSA, the passive voice marker is the prefix [in-] or [at:a-] attached to the respective verbs to make the subject of the verb change from the agent or experiencer to the patient or theme.This changes the voice of the sentence from active to passive.Because of this, most structures of the verbs we considered in HSA retain vowel harmony of the active voice verbs in the passive forms.Conversely, in MSA, when verbs are in the passive voice, vowel harmony does not work since the marker of the passive voice is regularly structured as [C1uC2iC3], as in [sˈuʔilə] ask.PFV-3.SG.M 'it, masculine, was asked' and [ʔˈuxiðə] take.PFV-3.SG.M 'it, masculine, was taken'.
Note that for the vowel-medial verbs, the passive voice structure is [C 1 iC 2 ə] as in [qˈilə] say.PFV-PASS-3.SG.M 'it, masculine, was said'.This structure is different from the previous rule of structuring the passive voice because vowel clusters are impermissible in MSA.If we apply the rule [C 1 uC 2 iC 3 ] to the active voice structure of a vowel-medial root verb and replace the second consonant of the rule with the second vowel of the vowel-medial root verb, the result would be a three-vowel cluster as [C 1 uV 2 iC 3 *].As regards the non-vowel root verbs, the medial consonant [xrʒ] 'root of exit' is geminated to have the structure [C 1 uC: 2 iC 3 ] for the passive voice form of the verb.Table 4 below summarizes some passive verb forms in MSA and HSA.The structure of the passive voice in HCA demonstrates a further difference.As referred to above, in MSA, the method of deriving the passive form from the three-consonant root is to geminate the medial consonant as in the passive voice forms of the verb rooted as [xrʒ].In HCA, such gemination is marked, and the unmarked passive form structure for the three consonant root verbs would be [C 1 uC 2 iC 3 ə].Consider the examples below.Interestingly, this contradicts the gemination rule, marking off some Semitic languages: Chaha, a Semitic Ethiopian language, and Modern Hebrew (McCarthy, 1986).According to this rule, gemination in an ancestral variety is degeminated in a successor variety of the language.Another noteworthy difference in HCA exists in the three-consonant root verbs.In such verbs, the vowel in the onset position, which follows the first consonant, is long.See below examples.This onset-vowel long feature occurs with the active voice.

Table 2
An illustration of the nonconcatenative morphology in HSA of the past tense verbs derived from the root[xrʒ]

Table 4
Summary of some passive verb forms in MSA and HSA