ABSTRACT
The traditional approach to Arabic morphology is inspired by a structural analytical perspective whereby words are viewed as a combination of consonantal roots and word patterns. Morphology is about the way words and word parts are processed during word comprehension and production. The nonlinear morphology of Arabic presents three properties that are challenging for current models of word structure, word formation, and word processing. These properties pertain to the nature and grammatical status of its word constituents: the consonantal roots and word patterns, the way these constituents are represented lexically and manipulated by the grammar, and the nature of word formation. The chapter provides a review of experimental data and an assessment of the insight it has allowed into these properties. It discusses how the major theoretical models account for some Arabic nonlinear morphological phenomena and examines the experimental paradigms and experimental data which speak to the questions mentioned earlier.
