The Formation of Simplex Nouns in Urban Hijazi Arabic: A Distributed Morphology Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the structure of the simplex nouns in Hijazi Arabic following the Distributed Morphology (DM) framework. It is argued that simplex nouns are derived in the syntax from neutral root and morphosyntactic features in the same way phrases are. All nouns in Hijazi Arabic (HA) must inflect for gender and number. Moreover, all nouns can attach to the definite article al-"the". Hence, it is proposed that the functional heads (n)ominaliser, (Gen)der, (Num)ber, and (D)eterminer respectively c-command the neutral root and host the relevant feature value.