36.3921, Calls: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3921. Mon Dec 22 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3921, Calls: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives (Germany)

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Date: 19-Dec-2025
From: Abdelkader Fassi Fehri and Peter Hallman [peter.hallman at ofai.at]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives


Full Title: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon:
Old and New Themes and Perspectives

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Contact Person: Peter Hallman
Meeting Email: peter.hallman at ofai.at
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Subject Language(s): Arabic (ara)
Language Family(ies): Semitic

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2026

Call for Papers:
Abstracts are invited for 20 minute presentations at the workshop “The
New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives” to
be held at the 59th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica
Europaea (SLE) in Osnabrück, German, August 26-29, 2026.
The workshop welcomes abstracts on the structure of the lexicon of
Arabic or other Semitic languages, specifically the role of roots and
templates in word structure. Abstracts may apply theoretical
constructs from morphology, syntax and semantics as well as evidence
from acquisition studies, psycholinguistics, loan word incorporation
or other phenomena that speak to role of roots and templates the
structure of the Arabic/Semitic lexicon.
The kinds of questions the workshop seeks to address include: Do roots
have event/argument structures (as in Levinson 2014), or not (Borer
2014)? If they do, is there a limit on how complex that argument
structure can be (intransitive, transitive, ditransitive)? What is the
ontology available to root denotations? Are they uniform in
denotation, denoting individual or state descriptions, or can they
denote complex event descriptions? Can roots have a degree argument if
they derive gradable words, or have an inherent aspectual type, or is
aspect encoded in other components of the word? Can roots show
homophony, having different meanings in different templates, or
exhibit polysemy or allosemy in Marantz’s (2013) sense?
A second important theme is that of templates, and the roles they play
with respect to phonological form, morphology, syntax, or logical
form. The role of templates is not limited to derivational morphology,
but extends to inflectional morphology. Number is ‘internal’ in broken
plurals (kaatib ‘writer’ → kuttaab ‘writers’), although it can be an
external suffix (muslim ‘moslem’ →  muslim-uun ‘moslems’).
Voice/aspect can also be ‘internal’ (as in katab ‘wrote’ vs. yaktub
‘writes’), or a prefix (sa-yaktub ‘will write’), etc.
Further, how tightly are morphological templates and syntactic
categories correlated? Templates tend to fix a word’s syntactic
category, but often they are ambiguous. For example, the noun ħariiq
‘fire’ shares its template CaCiiC with many adjectives, such as θamiin
‘valuable’ and baliid ‘stupid’, etc. Is this a case of templatic
homophony, or is it only a single template which appears in more than
one category (as a sort of allosemy)? Some recent research has claimed
that Arabic words are categorized only after they associate with a
morphological template, which suggests that templates themselves are
not categorizing (Fassi Fehri, in press), while other work explicitly
eschews null categorizers (Borer 2014). If there are null categorizers
independent of the templates, it raises the question of how complex
uncategorized structure can be, and what structural mechanisms operate
at the root level before categorization (Fassi Fehri, ibid, Hallman
2024).
Another important theme, often not thoroughly investigated, typically
in the case of Standard Arabic and in the context of diglossia, is the
language acquisition of Arabic. Most acquisition, psycholinguistic,
and neurolinguistic studies have converged on the assumption that the
root is a real mental object in the mind of Arabic speakers (Badry
1982, Abdo & Hilu 1991, Prunet, Béland & Idrissi 2000, Boudelaa &
Marslen-Wilson, 2013, among others) or Hebrew speakers (Feldman, Frost
and Penini 1995, Armon-Lotem & Berman 2003, Berman 2003, Ravid 2003,
etc.). But templates, as correlates of roots, must exist independently
in the mind, although less is known about their mental representation
and properties, including their categorizing effect. A big gap in the
literature is the absence of significant acquisition studies of
Standard Arabic, a language that is first acquired through acquisition
of the local colloquial variety and the increasing early exposition to
the standard variety, and which becomes the language of instruction at
school in a diglossic context. Most acquisition studies focalize on
dialectal Arabic, and rarely address the acquisition through stages of
the standard variety by native Arabic speakers (See e.g. Omar 1973;
Aljenaie 2010; Saiegh-Haddad et al. 2012, Albirini 2017). It is also
of importance from a comparative perspective to see whether some
notion of root and template morphology is relevant for the acquisition
of non-Semitic languages; see Vihman (2014) and Vihman & Wauquier
(2017) for discussion of this issue.
A further important topic is that of loanwords. It has long been
observed that loanwords can be incorporated into the root and template
system (Broselow 1976, McCarthy & Prince 1990, Cohen 2019). But what
mechanisms are involved in the postulation of a new root? Is analogy a
fundamental component of the root and template system within the
language?
Researchers wishing to contribute to any the topics addressed above
are invited to submit an anonymous abstract of no more than 500 words,
including examples but excluding references, through the SLE website
by January 15, 2026. Note that authors must be members of the SLE to
submit an abstract. If you are not already an SLE member, it is
necessary to become one (https://societaslinguistica.eu) before
accessing the members area of the SLE website where abstracts may be
submitted. When submitting an abstract, select the workshop “The New
Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon (SLE Workshop II): Old and New Themes and
Perspectives” (WS 18). See the SLE call for papers for more details at
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/third-call-for-papers/, and the
full workshop announcement at
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/list-of-workshops/.
References:
Abdo, Dawud & Salwa Hilu. 1991. Fii lugat at-t-tifl. 2vol. Amman: Daar
al-kramal.
Albirini, Abdulkafi. 2017. The acquisition of Arabic as a first
language. In Benmamoun, Eabbas, Reem Bassiouney (eds.) The Routledge
handbook of Arabic linguistics, pp. 227-248. London: Routledge.
Aljenaie, Khawla. 2010 Verbal inflection in the acquisition of Kuwaiti
Arabic. Journal of Child Language 37(4):841-863.
Armon-Lotem, Sharon, & Ruth Berman. 2003. The emergence of grammar:
Early verbs and beyond. Journal of Child Language, 30(4), 845–877.
Badry, Fatima. 1982. The Centrality of the Root in Semitic Lexical
Derivation.: Evidence from Children's Acquisition of Moroccan Arabic.
Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 21, 9-15. Stanford:
Stanford University.
Berman, Ruth. 2003. Children’s lexical innovations. In Shimron, Joseph
(ed.) Language processing and acquisition in languages of Semitic,
root-based, morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 243-292.
Borer, Hagit. 2014. The category of roots. In Alexiadou, Artemis,
Hagit Borer & Florian Schäfer (eds.) The syntax of roots and the roots
of syntax, pp. 112-148. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boudelaa, Sami & William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2013. Morphological
structure in the Arabic mental lexicon: Parallels between standard and
dialectal Arabic. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(10), 1453-1473.
Broselow, Ellen. 1976. The phonology of Egyptian Arabic. Ph.D.
dissertation. Amherst: the University of Mass.
Cohen, Evan. 2019. Loanword phonology in Modern Hebrew. Brill’s
Journal of Afroasiaic Languages and Linguistics 11(1):182-200.
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. In press. The New Arabic Lexicon and its
Words. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Feldman, L.B., Frost, R. and Penini, T. 1995. Decomposing words into
their constitutent morphemes: Evidence from English and Hebrew.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition
21:947-960.
Hallman, Peter. 2024. Argument Structure Hierarchies and Alternations
in Causative and Double Object Constructions. Glossa, 9(1), 1-45.
Levinson, Lisa. 2014. The ontology of roots and verbs. In Alexiadou,
Artemis, Hagit Borer and Florian Schäfter (eds) The syntax of roots
and the roots of syntax, pp. 208-229. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marantz, Alec. 2013. Locality Domains for Contextual Allomorphy across
the Interfaces. In Ora Matushansky & Alec Marantz (eds.). Distributed
Morphology Today. Morphemes for Morris Halle, 95-115.
McCarthy, John & Alan Prince. 1990. Foot and word in prosodic
morphology: The Arabic broken plural. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 8:209-283.
Oman, Margaret. 1973. The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native
language. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Prunet, Jean-François, Renée Béland and Ali Idrissi. 2000. The mental
representation of Semitic words. Linguistic Inquiry 31(4):609-648.
Ravid, Dorit. 2003. A developmental perspective on root perception in
Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic. In Shimron, Joseph (ed.) Language
processing and acquisition in languages of Semitic, root-based,
morphology, 293-320. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor, Areen Hadieh and Dorit Ravid. 2012. Acquiring
noun plurals in Palestinian Arabic: Morphology, familiarity and
pattern frequency. Language Learning 62(4):1079-1109.
Vihman, Marilyn. 2014. Phonological development: The first two years.
Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Vihman, Marilyn & Sophie Wauquier. 2017. Templates in child language.
In Maya Hickmann, Edy Veneziano & Harriet Jisa (eds.), Sources of
Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, Contexts and
Learners, pp. 27-43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



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