Standard Arabic Phonological and Morphological Tools of Morpheme-Formation, Derivation and Inflection Majed Al-Najjar, Professor of General Linguistics, Department of Foreign Languages, the Applied Science University, Amman, Jordan

Abstract

Standard Arabic employs a set of phonological and morphological tools in forming morphemes, and in derivation and inflection. These tools comprise patterns, prefixes and suffixes ( which are rare), proclitics, enclitics, discontinuous morphemes, and zero morph. Patterns are considered the major tools in Arabic morpheme-formation, derivation and inflection. They are classified in three categories: phonological patterns that generate morphemes (mainly morphemic past tense verbs), patterns that derive new lexical categories or new meanings for the same lexical categories, and patterns that inflect words to other words of the same lexical category, but the inflected words have different syntactic distribution. Derivational and inflectional patterns are replacive in that they replace morpheme-formation patterns in the processes of derivation and inflection.