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

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Arabic synthetic compounds

 | King Saud University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 5 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00002.ald
Abstract
This paper discusses some data of Arabic synthetic compounds in which regular plural inflection is included inside compounds. These data pose problems to Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. From cyclic phonology to lexical phonology. In Hulst, Harry van der & Smith, Norval (eds.), The structure of phonological representations (Part 1), 131–175. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar level-ordering lexical morphology model and Li, Yafei. 1990. X°-binding and verb incorporation. Linguistic Inquiry 211. 399–426.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar 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.
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
References (42)
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