KABUL PERSIAN VERB STEMS REVISITED

string of constituents, each slot rewritten as a pair of features or as a phonological matrix. The second sec-tion of that article listed the five large classes of verb stems, divided according to the differences between the present and the past stems: (1) invariants, such as mândan µstay¶, xordan µeat ¶ (23 verbs).1 (2) consonantal alternations, such as bast/band µtie ¶ (70 verbs). (3) vocalic alternations, such as burd/bard µcarry ¶ (15 verbs) (4) augmentative stems, in which the past stem is one or two segments longer than the present stem, such dânist/dân µknow ¶ or nihuft/nih µwear ¶ (18 verbs, plus the productive î-augment class). (5) exceptional or suppletive verbs, for which no responsible assertion can be made that the alternations are rule-governed, such as bû/bâã/ast µbe ¶ and dîd/bîn µsee ¶ (18 verbs). Other members of class (5) may share one or more alternations with members of another class, such as zudûd/zidâ µrub off ¶ which shares a process with âsûd/âsâ µrest, ¶ but has a unique vowel alternation earlier in the stem. A linguist writing rules to describe linguistic phenomena such as the above is trying to account for the knowledge that native speakers of the language have in their minds, and to do so in a manner consisten