@inproceedings{payne-2026-logical,
    title = "A Logical Analysis of Autosegmental Approaches to Root-and-Pattern Morphology in {A}rabic",
    author = "Payne, Sarah",
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.9/",
    pages = "90--99",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "Autosegmental approaches to Arabic root-and-pattern morphology generally take a three-tier approach, with tiers corresponding to the prosodic template, consonantal root, and affixes (e.g., McCarthy 1981); association between these tiers proceeds from left-to-right. However, Jardine (2017) shows that left-to-right association exceeds regular computation for autosegmental representations of arbitrary length, challenging the cognitive plausibility of this approach. This paper demonstrates that in the case of Arabic morphology, the constraints of the system itself {---} in particular, the finite length of the consonantal root {---} allow such a left-to-right autosegmental association to not only be definable with Monadic Second Order (MSO) logic, but with First Order logic. This paper introduces a logical relational structure formalizing the three-tier autosegmental representations and defines a set of transductions which apply in parallel over these structures to yield well-formed root and affix associations."
}