This is an investigation of Arabic derivational morphology that focuses on the relationship between verb meaning and linguistic form. Beginning with the ground form, the text offers a comprehensive analysis of the most common verb patterns of Arabic from a lexical semantic perspective. Peter Glanville explains why verbs with seemingly unrelated meanings share the same phonological shape, and analyses sets of words that contain the same consonantal root to arrive at a common abstraction. He uses both contemporary and historical data to explore the semantics of reflexivity, symmetry, causation, and repetition, and argues that the verb patterns of Arabic that express these phenomena have come about as the result of grammaticalisation and analogical processes that are common cross-linguistically.

This book explores Arabic derivational morphology, focusing on the relationship between verb meaning and linguistic forms from a lexical semantic perspective. It explains why verbs with seemingly unrelated meanings share the same phonological shape, and analyses sets of words containing the same consonantal root to arrive at a common abstraction.

The Arabic verbal system is, for most grammarians, the keystone of the language. Notable for the regularity of its patterns, it presents the linguist with an unparalleled opportunity to explore the Saussurean notion of the indivisible sign: form and meaning. Whilst Arabic forms are well-documented, the elucidation of the corresponding meanings has proved more challenging. Beginning with an examination of the verbal morphology of Modern Standard Arabic, including an evaluation of the significance of the consonantal root, this volume then concentrates on establishing the function of the vowel-lengthening verbal patterns (III and VI). It explores issues of mutuality and reciprocity, valency and transitivity, ultimately focusing on atelic lexical aspect as the unified meaning of these patterns. This study is rich in data and relies extensively upon contemporary examples (with transliteration and translation) to illustrate its arguments, adopting an empirical structuralist approach which is aimed both at general linguists and at specialist Arabists.

This book is an investigation of Arabic derivational morphology that focuses on the relationship between verb meaning and linguistic form. Beginning with the ground form, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the most common verb patterns of Arabic from a lexical semantic perspective. Peter Glanville explains why verbs with seemingly unrelated meanings share the same phonological shape, and analyses sets of words that contain the same consonantal root to arrive at a common abstraction. He uses both contemporary and historical data to explore the semantics of reflexivity, symmetry, causation, and repetition, and argues that the verb patterns of Arabic that express these phenomena have come about as the result of grammaticalization and analogical processes that are common cross-linguistically. The book adopts an approach to morphology in which rule-based derivation has created word patterns and consonantal roots, with the result that in some derivations roots may be extracted from a source word and plugged in to a pattern. It illustrates the semantic relationship between a source word and its derivative, while also offering evidence to support the view of the consonantal root as a morphological object. The volume will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Arabic language and linguistics who are interested in understanding the verb patterns of Arabic, the derivational relationships between words, and the construction of meaning in the mind. It will also appeal to researchers and students in morphology, semantics, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 18th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2017, held in Leshan, China, in May 2017. The 48 full papers and 5 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: lexical semantics; applications of natural language processing; lexical resources; and corpus linguistics.

Justice's first aim in this volume is to demystify the Arabic language, which is widely perceived as difficult to learn, and has been characterised as ambiguous and confusingly polysemous. The central concern of this three-dimensional portrait of Classical Arabic is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language is a determinant of other aspects of culture. But rather than focusing on the possible influences of language on thought, Justice is intersted in connections between language and language use or langue and parole. Among the topics treated are: the difficulty of Arabic; morphosyntax and Whorfian semantics; the role of duality in Arabic; iconicity; a population profile of vocabulary; the syntactic cut' of Arabic; and the relation between causatives and verbs that ascribe qualities to an object. This erudite and thought-provoking volume will be of interest not only to Arabists but to linguistic anthropologists in general.

Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: PhD, University of Baghdad, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the semantic extensions of verbs of touch in English and Arabic. Verbs of touch, as one type of verbs of sensation, are extended metaphorically in a variety of ways that is different from one language to another. Culture is assumed to strongly influence the semantic extensions of verbs of sensation in general and those of touch in particular. This study comes out with a conclusion that this type of verbs are extended semantically to cover a variety of meanings in both languages, English and Arabic.