Arabic word structure: an overview

Abstract

“The Semitic root is one of the great miracles of man's language.” Morphology in general Morphology, or word structure, pertains to the organization, rules, and processes concerning meaningful units of language, whether they be words themselves or parts of words, such as affixes of various sorts. Meaningful components and subcomponents at the word level are referred to as morphemes. Arabic morphology is different from English in some very basic respects but it is highly systematic. In fact, Arabic and the Semitic languages have had substantial influence on the development of certain key concepts in theoretical morphology. Theories of word structure, or morphology, usually focus on two essential issues: how words are formed (derivational or lexical morphology) and how they interact with syntax (inflectional morphology, e.g., marking for categories such as gender, number, case, tense). Arab grammarians, starting in the late eighth and early ninth centuries AD, developed sophisticated analyses of Arabic morphology that differ from modern Western theories, but interrelate with them in interesting ways. Because this reference grammar is intended primarily for the use of Western readers, it is organized along the lines of traditional Western categories, with inclusion of the Arabic terminology. Derivational or lexical morphology has to do with principles governing word formation (such as analysis of the English words “truthful” or “untruthfulness” derived from the base word “true”). Inflectional morphology describes how words vary or inflect in order to express grammatical contrasts or categories, such as singular/plural or past/present tense.