ABSTRACT
One of the classic linguistic problems is the morphological system prevailing in most members of the Semitic language family. Unlike the more familiar basically concatenative morphology of the Indo-European languages, Semitic displays a wide variety of purely morphological alternations internal to the stem, chiefly of nouns and verbs. The behavior of quadriliteral nouns in confirms the observation that the formation of denominal nomina vasis is mediated by the morphology of the verbal system. The phenomena of reduplication and infixation, as well as the notion of a prosodic template, figure prominently. Morphological transformations potentially allow any arbitrary operation on a segmental string. Like transformational morphological rules of this sort can freely move particular segments an unbounded distance within the word, copy all and only the vowels in a word, or reverse strings of finite length. The morphological rule altering verb to noun simply says "change the right branch to w".
