An HPSG analysis of Arabic passive

Abstract

In spite of being a successful syntactic theory in many respects, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) has inadequate coverage for morphological constructions, especially for nonconcatenative morphology, which is prominent in the Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew etc. Among various syntactic and semantic phenomenon, passive constructions draws attention of many researchers in theoretical linguistics due to their diversity. Arabic exhibits lexical passives with nOl\concatenative morphology. In this paper, we extend the IJPSG framework to support the nonconcatenative constru¢tion of Arabic passives along with the necessary lexical rules' and type hierarchy.

Arabic nominals in HPSG: A verbal noun perspective

“…Arabic verb is an excellent example of nonconcatenative root-pattern based morphology. A combination of root letters are plugged in a variety of morphological patterns with priorly fixed letters and particular vowel melody that generates verbs of a particular type which has some syntactic and semantic information (Bhuyan and Ahmed, 2008b). Figure 1 shows how different sets of root letters plugged into a vowel pattern generate different verbs with some common semantic meanings.…”

“…HPSG analyses for nonconcatenative morphology in general and for Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and others) languages in particular are relatively new (Bhuyan and Ahmed, 2008b;Mutawa et al, 2008;Kihm, 2006;Bhuyan and Ahmed, 2008c;Riehemann, 2000;Bird and Klein, 1994;Bhuyan and Ahmed, 2008a;Islam et al, 2009). However, the intricate nature of Arabic morphology motivated several research projects addressing the issues (Beesley, 2001;Buckwalter, 2004;Smrž, 2007).…”

A Prolog-based approach to Arabic syntax and semantics

“…It has also been used for information retrieval in Arabic (Gashaw et al, 2019). Some studies have used Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) for Arabic verbs (Bhuyan et al, 2008) and nominal sentences (Mutawa et al, 2008). Lately, attention has been paid to using LFG to handle Arabic grammar (Attia, 2006;Attia, 2007;Attia et al, 2010, and Arabic morphological and syntactic ambiguity (Attia, 2012).…”