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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.32–60

Arabic synthetic compounds

| King Saud University

This paper discusses some data of Arabic synthetic compounds in which regular plural inflection is included inside compounds. These data pose problems to Kiparsky’s (1982) level-ordering lexical morphology model and Li’s (1990) generalization on verb incorporation. I argue that such compounds are lexically formed based on some pieces of evidence. To support the analysis, I compare the compounds and the construct state constructions in Arabic and Hebrew. Then I show that the lexical analysis explains the morphological, syntactic properties, and the semantics of Arabic synthetic compounds. More specifically, I explain how the lexical analysis applies to theta-role assignment inside the compound and then discuss the number specification of the non-head in the compound of Arabic and English.

Keywords: Arabic synthetic compounds, lexical morphology, English compounds, theta-role, regular inflections in compounds
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
    • 2.1The prosodic morphology of bp and sp
      • 2.1.1 McCarthy & Prince (1990)
      • 2.1.2Ratcliffe (1990; 1997; 2003)
    • 2.2Distributed Morphology (dm)
    • 2.3Dual morphological systems
    • 2.4Lexical phonology and morphology (Kiparsky 1982)
    • 2.5Compound and plurality
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Lexical analysis of ASC
    • 4.1ASC: lexical or syntactic?
      • 4.1.1The use of modifiers
      • 4.1.2Referentiality
      • 4.1.3Conjunction of the complement
      • 4.1.4Semantic idiosyncrasy
      • 4.1.5Theta-role satisfaction
    • 4.2Lexical analysis of ASC
      • 4.2.1Lexical structure framework
      • 4.2.2Theta-role assignment in ASC
      • 4.2.3The number specification in ASC
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00002.ald
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