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Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural

What it is about

The authors present PRIM (Pattern-and-Root Inflectional Morphology), a dictionary-based model for the inflection of Arabic nouns, with the broken plural (internal plural such as ʿuqdah, plural ʿuqad) as its main target. It keeps the traditional root and pattern notions but separates inflection from derivation and semantics, uses surface roots instead of deep roots, and has no morphophonological rules: the dictionary stores lemmas fully diacritized and each entry carries a short code (singular pattern, broken-plural pattern, root code). Nouns with a triliteral broken plural fall into 22 patterns in 90 classes, and nouns with a quadriliteral one into 3 patterns in 70 classes; with singular variation these give 300 inflectional classes. The scheme is applied to about 3,200 broken-plural noun entries. The authors argue that generative rule systems are under-specified and that multi-stem lexicons repeat the same information in every stem.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 goes into The weak verbs, and into The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral for nominal patterns. I2 is a check for The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral and for macula dict. I3 is a lemma rule for macula dict.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1016/j.langsci.2013.06.002 · arXiv 2605.22310

@misc{neme2026pattern,
  title = {{Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural}},
  author = {Neme, Alexis Amid and Laporte, Eric},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1016/j.langsci.2013.06.002},
  eprint = {2605.22310},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.06.002}
}

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