Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural

2026-05-21

AI Summary

This study addresses the inefficiency of traditional Arabic inflectional morphology models in handling broken plurals, which rely heavily on complex lexicons and phonological rules. The work proposes an innovative “pattern-over-root” framework that decouples inflection, derivation, and semantics, while encoding root alternations and orthographic variations as factual, independent representations. The approach employs a structured, updatable lexicon, a simplified vowel notation system (v/vv), and a direct lookup mechanism that eliminates the need for phonological rules. It establishes a fine-grained classification of 3,200 broken plural nouns: triliteral and quadriliteral forms are grouped into 90 and 70 pattern classes respectively, yielding 300 distinct inflectional classes when combined with singular variants. This architecture significantly enhances analytical efficiency and system maintainability.

Abstract

We present a substantially implemented model of description of the inflectional morphology of Arabic nouns, with special attention to the management of dictionaries and other language resources by Arabic-speaking linguists. The breakthrough lies in the reversal of the traditional root-and-pattern Semitic model into pattern-and-root, giving precedence to patterns over roots. Our model includes broken plurals (BPs), i.e. plurals formed by modifying the stem. It is based on the traditional notions of root and pattern of Semitic morphology. However, as compared to traditional Arabic morphology, it keeps the formal description of inflection separate from that of derivation and semantics. As traditional Arabic dictionaries, the updatable dictionary is structured in lexical entries for lemmas, and the reference spelling is fully diacritized. In our model, morphological analysis of Arabic text is performed directly with a dictionary of words and without morphophonological rules. Our taxonomy for noun inflection is simple, orderly and detailed. We simplify the taxonomy of singular patterns by specifying vowel quantity as v or vv, and ignoring vowel quality. Root alternations and orthographical variations are encoded independently from patterns and in a factual way, without deep roots or morphophonological or orthographical rules. Nouns with a triliteral BP are classified according to 22 patterns subdivided into 90 classes, and nouns with a quadriliteral BP according to 3 patterns subdivided into 70 classes. These 160 classes become 300 inflectional classes when we take into account inflectional variations that affect only the singular. We provide a straightforward encoding scheme that we applied to 3 200 entries of BP nouns.

Problem

• Arabic morphology
• broken plural
• inflectional morphology
• pattern-and-root
• lexical resources

Innovation

• pattern-and-root
• broken plural
• inflectional morphology
• Arabic morphology
• lexical taxonomy