Word-based morphology of Arabic and Semtic project



Motivations

“Words in Arabic (and other Semitic languages) are formed by a combination of consonantal roots, which express the meaning, and syllabic-vocalic patterns which express grammatical functions” has become such a commonplace in the treasury of received ideas, that only a lunatic or someone determined to be deliberately perverse would take issue with it. At least that is the general reaction I’ve gotten from most people, linguists and non-linguists alike, to the word-based approach to the study of Arabic morphology. But speaking for myself at least, perversity is not the motivation. Rather the reasons for wanting to assume that a word or stem is the primitive listed form in the lexicon and that derivational relationships are stated between words is that this assumption provides a better framework for dealing with some empirical problems which emerge from broad and deep study of Arabic both in itself and in comparison with other languages. continue...

My papers on the Subject

Links to other scholars working on similar approaches

2003. "Toward a Universal Theory of Shape-Invariant (Templatic) Morphology: Classical Arabic reconsidered" in Rajendra Singh and Stanley Starosta, eds. Explorations in Seamless Morphology, pp. 212-269. New Delhi, London, and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. abstract can be read here
the complete paper is available here universaltemplate.pdf へのリンク

1998. The 'Broken' Plural Problem in Arabic and Comparative Semitic: Allomorphy and Analogy in Non-concatenative Morphology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. the relevant chapter is available here

1997. "Prosodic Templates in a Word-Based Morphological Analysis of Arabic". Mushira Eid & Robert Ratcliffe, eds. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics X, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 147-171