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Psych construction types in Arabic as root-based in templatic morphosyntax

  • Abdelkader Fassi Fehri ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 28, 2024

Abstract

We motivate the view that Arabic psych construction types originate as root phrases, devoid of categorial specifications, rather than verbal phrases, as commonly assumed. It is shown that roots are categorially and ontologically flexible, and that valency affixes are arguably roots, not categorical templates. Furthermore, the root/template divide, as defended by many authors, can only be construed as morphonological, once implemented in Distributed Morphology, rather than morphosyntactic. One advantage of our approach over the category (or vP) based approach is that it can apply on equal bases to all categories alike, because roots are acategorial, and psych expressions are not limited only to verb phrases. This is supported cross-linguistically by the existence of psych nominals or adjectives that have no verbal source. More motivation for the root hypothesis comes the root ontological flexibility, their complexity in valency increasing or decreasing morphosyntactic alternations, as well as from investigating adicity limitations on psych nominals, compared to those of psych (causative) verbs.


Corresponding author: Abdelkader Fassi Fehri, The ACVL Project at the Linguistic Society of Morocco, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of STUF for their valuable remarks and suggestions which have helped me to improve the content and readibility of the article. Thanks a lot to Maather Alrawii for comments and help with editing, to Huda Salem for having contributed to content and shaping some of the ideas involved here, as well as relevant data, and to Nadia Aamiri for helpful discussions and support. This material has been presented at various conferences, in Arabic and English, including notably the SLE Conference at the University of Athens, September 2023. Thanks to the audiences.

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Published Online: 2024-11-28
Published in Print: 2024-11-26

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