36.2816, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives (Germany)

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Subject: 36.2816, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives (Germany)

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Date: 18-Sep-2025
From: Peter Hallman [peter.hallman at ofai.at]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: The New Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon: Old and New Themes and Perspectives


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: Peter Hallman
Contact Email: peter.hallman at ofai.at
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Morphology;
Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax
Subject Language(s): Arabic (ara)
Language Family(ies): Semitic

Submission Deadline: 31-Oct-2025

Convenors:
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri (Mohammed V University & Linguistic Society of
Morocco)
Peter Hallman (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial
Intelligence)
Key words: Arabic/Semitic lexicon, root/template morphosyntax,
allosemy, acquisition
Meeting Description:
In light of the enthusiastic and successful reception of the first SLE
Workshop on the Arabic (Semitic) Lexicon, held at the 57th SLE Meeting
at Helsinki, 2024, and sustained interest in developing descriptive,
typological, and comparative studies, within theoretical perspectives,
around the same major theme, we propose to launch a second SLE
Workshop dedicated to refining and further exploring important new
themes and issues concerned with the Arabic/Semitic lexicon.
The first theme concerns the contents and roles of roots and
templates, the basic building blocks in Arabic/Semitic word formation.
The notion of root that emerged originally from Semitic studies
(Al-Faraahiidii, 8th c.; Greenberg 1950) has  become common currency
in contemporary morphosyntax as an (uncategorized) derivational ‘point
of entry’ in word structure even in non-Semitic languages (Halle &
Marantz 1993; Chomsky 1995, 2019; Marantz 1995; Embick 2004; Harley
2012), albeit as a contiguous phoneme sequence. Semitic roots consist
only of consonants that appear in various prosodic templates with a
common broad meaning. Hence the root ħrq builds the verb ħaraq ‘burn’,
the event noun ħarq ‘burning’, the entity noun ħariiq ‘fire’, the
adjective ħarraaq ‘ablaze’, etc. The root then contributes a
conceptual domain that the template semantically particularizes, and
syntactically categorizes. The view that the root is a common base to
related words has been extensively put to use in the analysis of
English and other non-Semitic languages. Notwithstanding influential
ground breaking studies (Borer 2005; Arad 2005; Doron 2003; Lowenstamm
2014; Fassi Fehri 2018), the Semitic languages themselves have not
been thoroughly studied from this perspective. The workshop aims to
rectify this ironic state of affairs, by bringing together scholars
interested in sharing research results on the structure of words in
languages whose root and category structure is not a theoretical
extrapolation, but is a tangible, easily observable generative system
fundamental to the structure of these languages’ lexicon, in order to
address the following questions.
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. Clearly, 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 most 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 the context of diglossia (Ferguson
1959) 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 & Helu 1991, Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson,
2013, Prunet, Béland & Idrissi 2000, among others) or Hebrew speakers
(Feldman et al. 1995, Armon-Lotem & 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 quasi-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. It is to
be noted that most acquisition  studies focalize on dialectal Arabic,
and they 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, Khamis-Dakwar 2021). 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?
In the workshop, we hope to bring together researchers interested in
Arabic/Semitic morphophonology, syntax, semantics, acquisition, and
other relevant subfields, to refine our understanding of the themes
and issues elucidated above, but also those investigating ways of
extending the Arabic/Semitic model to the analysis of non-Semitic
languages.
Call for Papers:
For inclusion in the workshop proposal, we invite abstracts for
20-minute talks (+ 5mn discussion) which contribute to development and
analysis of the core themes and issues discussed from a comparative
perspective, including description, organization, and design of the
lexicon, theories of word formation, mental reality of (pieces of)
words, and acquisition and stages of development of words or lexical
categories. Preliminary abstracts with name and affiliation, not
exceeding 300 words (in Word or other text format), should be sent to
the workshop conveners by October 31, 2025. Please send abstracts to
both convenors at peter.hallman at ofai.at and
abdelkaderfassifehri at gmail.com. Once the workshop proposal is
approved, prospective presenters will be asked to submit a full
abstract directly to SLE by 15 January 2024.
Selected References:
Abdo, Dawud & Salwa Hilu. 1991. Fii lugat at-t-tifl. 2vol. Amman: Daar
al-kramal.
Armon-Lotem, Sharon, & Ruth Berman. 2003. The emergence of grammar:
Early verbs and beyond. Journal of Child Language, 30(4), 845–877.
Arad, Maya. 2005. Roots and Patterns in Hebrew. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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. 2005. Structuring Sense, Vol. 1 In Name Only. Oxford
University Press.
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.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2019. UCLA Lectures.
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/noam-chomsky/
Doron, Edith. 2003. Agency and voice: The semantics of the Semitic
templates. Natural Language Semantics 11:1-67.
Embick, David. 2004. On the structure of resultative participles in
English. Linguistic Inquiry 35:355-392.
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing
Feminine to Mean: Gender, Number, Numeral and Quantifier Extensions in
Arabic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1950. The patterning of root morphemes in Semitic.
Word 6:162-182.
Halle, Morris, & Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the
pieces of inflection. In Ken Hale & Jay Keyser (eds.), The View from
Building 20, 111–76. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Hallman, Peter. 2024. Argument Structure Hierarchies and Alternations
in Causative and Double Object Constructions. Glossa, 9(1), 1-45.
Harley, Heidi. 2012. Lexical decomposition in modern syntactic theory.
In Hinzen, Worlfram, Edouard Machery and Markus Wernig (eds.) The
Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, Oxford University Press, pp.
328-350.
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.
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.
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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