External Evidence and the Semitic Root

Abstract

This article reviews the external evidence bearing on the internal structure of words in Semitic languages. This evidence comes mostly from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and lexical studies. Most of these studies have concluded that the mental lexicon of Semitic decomposes words into consonantal roots combined with other morphological units. While some studies in formal linguistics have also reached this conclusion on the basis of internal evidence, others have argued that Semitic roots must contain both consonants and vowels. This article reviews the theoretical and empirical motivations behind these two conclusions. It is proposed that i) convergences between external and internal types of evidence are theoretically significant, and ii) such convergences currently favor formal models of morphology that regard the consonantal root as a legitimate morphological unit in Semitic languages.