An HPSG analysis of Arabic passive

摘要

In spite of being a successful syntactic theory in many respects, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) has inadequate coverage for morphological constructions, especially for nonconcatenative morphology, which is prominent in the Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew etc. Among various syntactic and semantic phenomenon, passive constructions draws attention of many researchers in theoretical linguistics due to their diversity. Arabic exhibits lexical passives with nonconcatenative morphology. In this paper, we extend the HPSG framework to support the nonconcatenative construction of Arabic passives along with the necessary lexical rules and type hierarchy.