3.1.4 Non-concatenative Morphology

The kind of morphology we have discussed so far, in which a word is composed of a string of morphemes concatenated together is often called concatenative morphology. A number of languages have extensive non-concatenative morphology, in which morphemes are combined in more complex ways. The Tagalog infixation example above is one example of non-concatenative morphology, since two morphemes (hingi and um) are intermingled.

Another kind of non-concatenative morphology is called templatic morphology or root-and-pattern morphology. This is very common in Arabic, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages. In Hebrew, for example, a verb (as well as other parts-of-speech) is constructed using two components: a root, consisting usually of three consonants (CCC) and carrying the basic meaning, and a template, which gives the ordering of consonants and vowels and specifies more semantic information about the resulting verb, such as the semantic voice (e.g., active, passive, middle). For example the Hebrew tri-consonantal root lmd, meaning ‘learn’ or ‘study’, can be combined with the active voice CaCaC template to produce the word lamad, ‘he studied’, or the intensive CiCeC template to produce the word limed, ‘he taught’, or the intensive passive template CuCaC to produce the word lumad, ‘he was taught’. Arabic and Hebrew combine this templatic morphology with concatenative morphology (like the cliticization example shown in the previous section).