appeared in Phonology 16.3 (1999):401-442 The inadequacy of the consonantal root: Modern Hebrew denominal verbs and Output-Output correspondence * Adam Ussishkin UC Santa Cruz ussishki@email.arizona.edu 1 Introduction Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are known for what has become characterised as their discontiguous or nonconcatenative morphology. In the overwhelming majority of the literature, in both “traditional” and generative grammar, semantically related words in such languages are described as sharing a common root, usually consisting of three consonants. Such consonantal roots are viewed as actual morphemes with lexical status. Words are formed by affixation to roots; the most common type of such affixation is the interleaving of vowels between the consonants of a root. Within current phonology, the morphological status of roots was originally expressed through a multi-tiered representation, where the root occupied a distinguished tier (e.g., McCarthy 1979, 1981). More recently the notion of root has been challenged by Bat-El (1994a), who argues, based on properties of the process of denominal verb formation (DVF) in Modern Hebrew (MH), that the concept of root can be eliminated. In this paper, I present further arguments that there is no need to refer to roots in the process of DVF in MH. I also show that under such a view a * This paper has greatly benefited from the help of many people. Junko Ito, Armin Mester, and Jaye Padgett have provided comments on numerous drafts, and I wish to offer them my sincere gratitude and appreciation for their helpful suggestions. Many thanks also to Judith Aissen for her detailed comments on a previous draft of this paper. In addition, I would like to thank Gene Buckley, Edit Doron, Sharon Rose, Donca Steriade, Bernard Tranel, Rachel Walker, and Andrew Wedel, who have all provided very thoughtful questions, discussions and suggestions with respect to the issues under consideration here. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the many native speakers I have worked with as informants in Santa Cruz, Jerusalem, and Tel-Aviv: Danny Buchholz, Edit Doron, Rachel Giora, Shulamit Kuriansky, Na’ama Langholz, Noga Langholz, Gil Rilov, Ilan Yaniv, Keren Yaniv, and Oded Yaniv. Various versions of this paper have been presented at the 4 th Southwestern Optimality Theory Conference, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the 14 th annual meeting of the Israel Association of Theoretical Linguistics, and I thank the audiences there for many useful questions, comments, and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Phonology for their useful comments, suggestions, and advice, and Outi Bat-El and two anonymous Phonology reviewers whose questions and comments have been quite valuable, and whose input has aided in clarifying many issues discussed here. Any errors are, of course, my own. The author’s name has recently changed from Adam Sherman to Adam Ussishkin.