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LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION IN LANGUAGES OF SEMITIC, ROOT-BASED, MORPHOLOGY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2005

Fethi Mansouri
Affiliation:
Deakin University

Extract

LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION IN LANGUAGES OF SEMITIC, ROOT-BASED, MORPHOLOGY. Joseph Shimron (Ed.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. Pp. vi + 394. $156.00 cloth.

This book addresses a fundamental question in the morphological analysis and representation of Semitic languages—namely, whether Semitic word morphology is root based or word based. As Shimron suggests, “there are reasons to view the templates, not the roots, as the more influential factor in determining Semitic morphology” (p. 5). Yet, as others would argue, there are reasons not to disregard the root-based hypothesis altogether. In the case of Arabic morphology, for example, verbal forms inherently contain three nonlinear levels: the consonantal root, the vowel pattern, and the templatic prosody. This nonlinear feature provided a perfect illustration of what has become termed in the literature as root-and-patterns morphology (McCarthy & Prince, 1986, 1990).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

McCarthy, J. J., & Prince, A. (1986). Prosodic morphology. Unpublished manuscript, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brandeis University.
McCarthy, J. J., & Prince, A. (1990). Prosodic morphology and templatic morphology. In M. Eid and J. J. McCarthy (Eds.), Current issues in linguistic theory: Vol. 1. Perspectives on Arabic linguistics (pp. 154). Amsterdam: Benjamins.