La simulación dinámica de procesos en entornos virtuales 4D

Morphology is the branch of grammar which deals with the structure and rules of word formation. A central notion in morphology is the morpheme which refers to the smallest meaningful unit that can’t be further divided. For example, the English word ‘believable’ consists of two morphemes: the root ‘believe’ and the affix ‘able’. Morphemes are classified into two categories: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes refer to morphemes which can stand alone as a separate unit, e.g. ġarsa ‘tree’, grah ‘food on wedding day’, sēr ‘belt’, zarb ‘henhouse’, whereas bound morphemes are morphemes which cannot stand by themselves, i.e. they must be attached to other free morphemes to be meaningful17. For example, the WM Arabic word bēt-hum ‘their home’ consists of two morphemes: the free morpheme bēt ‘home’ which can stand by itself, and the 3m.pl. bound morpheme -hum, which cannot stand alone. Most languages have a large inventory of free morphemes with a fixed number of bound morphemes (Shdaifat 2014).

There are two basic morphological types: concatenative morphology and nonconcatenative morphology. Many of the languages of the world appear to exhibit a concatenative structure that involves either prefixation or suffixation. In this form of morphology, morphemes are seen as discrete units which are concatenated linearly to either edge of the word, right or left, to form a word (McCarthy 1981: 373). For instance, the English word ‘undividable’ comprises three discrete morphemes: the negative prefix un-, the stem morpheme divide and the adjectival suffix -able. The formation of this word involves the concatenation of the

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bound morphemes un- and -able respectively to the left and right edge of the stem, and it thus exhibits a concatenative structure that involves prefixation and suffixation.

Although English is a predominantly concatenative language, there are a number of nouns and verbs that are formed nonconcatenatively, i.e. through word formation processes which involve some modification within the stem. For example, the plural of some nouns is formed by an umlaut rule which involves a change in the stem vowel, e.g. man > men; woman >

women. Likewise, the inflection of some English verbs involves a change in the stem vowel.

For example, the verb sang comprises the verb [sing] plus the vowel [a] to denote the past tense.

Arabic has a nonconcatenative morphological system that is characterised by several morphological processes including: infixation, melodic overwriting, templatic change and reduplication. Infixation refers to the insertion of a bound morpheme between the root consonants. For example, Form VIII is derived from Form I by infixing the bound morpheme -t- after the first root consonant, e.g. k-t-asab ‘to earn’ that is derived from the Form I verb

kasab ‘to earn’. Gemination refers to the doubling of a root consonant. Gemination is used in

the formation of Form II verbs where the second medial consonant of the Form I verb is duplicated. For example, the Form II verb gaᶜᶜad ‘to make someone sit down’ is formed by doubling the second root consonant of the Form I verb gaᶜad ‘to sit down’. Melodic overwriting is a morphological process affecting the formation of passive structures whereby the vocalic melody of a transitive verb is overwritten by u-i in the perfect and u-a in the imperfect. For example, the passive of the CA Form I verb daras ‘to study’ is formed by overwriting the vocalic melody a-a to u-i, forming duris ‘it (m.) was studied’.

Arabic has also concatenative morphology in the formation of some words. Some morphemes in WM Arabic such as the definite article il- ‘the’, the feminine marker -a, the dual marker - ēn and the habitual morpheme bi- attach to the stem of the word. For example, the word b-

i-nām-u comprises four morphemes: the stem of the word nām ‘to sleep’, the habitual

morpheme b-, the third person masculine imperfect morpheme i- (y-) and the masculine plural morpheme -u. Thus, the formation of this word involves the concatenation of the bound morphemes bi-, i- and -u respectively to the left and right edges of the stem. Additionally, case endings in CA, i.e. nominative, accusative and genitive, are attached to stem nominals, and are examples of concatenative morphology. The CA word bayt-u-n

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‘house’, for example, consists of three morphemes: the stem morpheme bayt ‘house’, the nominative morpheme -u and nunation -n which indicates absolute state.

Morphological processes are traditionally classified into inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphology inflects words to provide grammatical contrasts, e.g. singular and plural, but never changes the class category of a word or its meaning. For example, the inflectional suffix -a can be added to the stem mᶜallim ‘teacher’ to obtain the feminine form

mᶜalm-a ‘female teacher’ without changing the class of the word. By contrast, derivational

morphology refers to the process of forming new words; it marks either lexical distinctions or changes in the class of a word. For instance, the active participle lāᶜib ‘player’ derived through a different template from the Form I verb liᶜib ‘to play’ changes the class of word from verb to noun.

Arabic has a root and pattern system that it shares with other Semitic languages, based on discontinuous morphemes. The stem of content words consists of three discontinuous morphemes (e.g. Watson 2002: 126): the consonantal root which bears lexical meaning, the templatic pattern and the vocalic melody which both convey syntactic information. For example, the CA verb kusir ‘it (m.) was broken’ comprises: the consonantal root k-s-r which denotes the act of breaking, the templatic pattern CVCVC which conveys perfect aspect, and the vocalic melody u-i which denotes passive voice. The combination of the three morphemes results in the form kusir ‘it (m.) was broken’.

Arabic verbs can be classified according to the number of consonants that each verbal root has. They could be biconsonantal, e.g. m-d ‘stretch’, triconsonantal, e.g. k-t-b ‘write’, or quadriconsonantal, e.g. s-y-ṭ-r ‘control’. The majority of Arabic verbs are triconsonantal. Verbs exhibit a number of templates known by the morphological pattern that characterises them. They are usually referred to as measures of the verbs (the Arabic term is ʔawzān). Arab grammarians chose the model root f-ᶜ-l to exemplify the different prosodic templates of Arabic verbs.