Quadriliteral comparatives in Arabic

Abstract In most dialects of Arabic the comparative (elative) seems to be derived by taking a base adjective and mapping it to a template of the shape ʔaCCaC. A traditional constraint on the elative, noted in Wright’s A Grammar of the Arabic Language and in Girod (2011) , is that it cannot be formed with a root containing four consonants nor can it incorporate affixal consonants. In this article, however, we illustrate the occurrence of such comparatives in southern Levantine Arabic, based on the Palestinian variety spoken natively by the first author and on native speaker consultations. We term these elatives “quadriliteral comparatives”. We argue that such comparatives are not based on an adjective or on an underlying root, but on a corresponding dialectal verb form that usually has the prefix [ʔit-]. Their meaning is typically evaluative rather than objective. We offer a formal analysis in the framework of Construction Morphology.