J. L. Malone - Böcker

The canonically anomalous shape of Syriac verb ekah 'to find' is shown to result from a convergence of diachronic pressures on an intersection of phonological weak spots and morphosyntactic imbalance. The effect of the changes is a trade-off of morphosyntactic defectiveness for moderate phonological anomaly. The developmental hypothesis adopted underscores the importance both of multiple factors in diachronic change and of homeostasis in linguistic systems.

An early established tenet of generative phonologists was that the SYSTEMATIC PHONEME should replace the neo Bloomfieldian AUTONOMOUS PHONEME in phonological theory, this being a gratuitous hypostatization frequently making it impossible to state phonological patterning in fully general form. This was early demonstrated by Robert Lees and Morris Halle in the now classical cases of Turkish and Russian devoicing. The present paper argues that for Tiberian Hebrew, ALTHOUGH autonomous phonemic analysis (2) and systematic phonemic analysis (3) clash in a considerably more radical way than do the above cases (4), NEVERTHELESS the distribution of the grapheme dagesh is interpretable only pursuant to the autonomous phonemic analysis (5). A solution is suggested to this apparent paradox (6).