Build the Word in the Arabic Language From the Perspective of Distributed Morphology Theory

Abstract

The issue of Build the word in Arabic and other natural languages has sparked intense debate in the generative literature, which has been concerned with answering the following questions:

How are words builed in natural languages? Is it done in the same way for non- Concatenative morphological languages in Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and Concatenative morphological languages in Indo-European languages, such as French, English, Italian, Spanish, and German? Where is this done? Is it in the Lexicon or in the syntax?

Two hypotheses have crystallized within the lexical concept: One of them believes that a word does not emerge from the Lexicon into the structure unless it is fully constructed, while the other suggests that the derivational inflectional rules are lexical rules, and the morphological rules are syntactic rules. In contrast, a syntactic conception has emerged that rejects the statement: “Everything happens in the Lexicon,” and suggests that build the word occurs in the same way that sentences are constructed.

Through this paper, we defend this syntactic perception, and restrict it to the theory of distributed morphology, which believes that build the word occurs through phases of derivation. In the first phase (inside the root domain), the root is merged with the head of the first category before it ascends in a second phase outside the domain of the root to the categorized element so that its categorial status is confirmed as a noun, verb, or adjective, according to morphological operations that may include morphological rules such as: merge. fusion, fission, and impoverishment. Others are phonological, such as spell-out and reconfiguration rules.