Nonconcatenative morphology: An HPSG analysis

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. In this paper, we extend the HPSG framework to support rich nonconcatenative morphology. We also define the first comprehensive HPSG-construction for the morphology of the verbal system of Arabic, the best instance of nonconcatenative morphology among the living languages.