Full Title: The Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon and its Words
Short Title: ARABLEX

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology; Phonology; Semantics; Syntax
Subject Language(s): Arabic, Standard (arb)
English (eng)
Language Family(ies): Semitic

Meeting Description:

Arabic (Semitic) words are ‘magical’. Written texts consist primarily of consonantal sequences. Insertion of vowel sequences is left to the endowed reader, to distinguish a noun from a verb, nabt ‘a plant’ and nabat ‘to plant’, or an adjective from a noun, fariħ ‘glad’ and faraħ ‘gladness’, or a passive from an active, qatal ‘to kill’, qutil ‘to be killed’, etc. The magic stems from the fact that the unreadable and uninterpretable non-linear Arabic word sequence of the text can become pronounceable and readable by the speaker without vocalization.

Prosodic or templatic morphology has provided clues for building words out of tiers or skeletons (McCarthy 1981, Kastner & Tucker 2020), but there is still a lot to understand about how the Arabic word is concretely constructed in word syntax, because its root is not syllabic like that of English, and vowels are not part of the derivation base (Fassi Fehri 2000, Arad 2005, Borer 2005, Lowenstamm 2014).

How are then words lexically related and organized in the grammar (Kastner 2020, Fassi Fehri et al 2021, Hallman 2023 )? English words are specified for a ‘lexical’ category, and derivations between categories are established (Baker 2003, Lieber 2006). But there is no such a ‘lexical category’ in Arabic. In English redden, a deadjectival verb is formed from an adjective, or (to) saddle or (to) milk are thought of as denominal verbs (Hale & Keyser 2002; although see Borer 2014). But there are no Arabic verbs that are morphologically derived from adjectives or nouns, etc. (Fassi Fehri et al 2021, 2023). Moreover, Arabic dictionaries make use of roots rather than stems as basic entries.

Frameworks like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz, 1997, 2001, Harley 2014) or Neo-constructivist grammars (Borer 2005) provide ways to deal with these peculiarities, separating the root from the category, but also bridging distinctions between Semitic and non-Semitic words, since roots and categories in all cases are morpho-syntactic and abstract (Harley 2014, Borer 2014, Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2020).

The workshop covers comparative and empirical issues surrounding the grammatical status of roots and their meanings, the nature of templatic derivation, valency processes involved in causatives, psych, perception or motion eventualities, nominals or nominalizations (Chosmsky 1970), argument selection (Grimshaw 1990), phases and locality constraints in word syntax (Chomsky 1995, 2020), allomorphy and allosemy (Marantz 2013, 2022, Wood 2022, Levinson 2014), and DM architecture (Embick 2010).

Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for a workshop on “The Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon and its Words”
(organized by Abdelkader Fassi Fehri and Peter Hallman), to be held as part of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguisica Europaea (SLE), hosted by the University of Helsinki, 21–24 August 2024. Submissions are welcome for 20-minute talks that contribute to the description, discussion, and analysis of core issues in the Arabic or Semitic lexicon from a comparative perspective, including its organization and design, theories of word formation, mental reality of (pieces of) words, and implementations in computation and lexicography. Preliminary abstracts (300 words; Word file; including affiliation) should be sent to the workshop conveners by November 10, 2023. Please send abstracts to both addresses: [email protected] and [email protected]. If the workshop proposal is successful, prospective presenters will be asked to submit a 500 word abstract directly to SLE by 15 January 2024.