Nominal Derivation in Standard Arabic and English: a Comparative Study

Abstract

#This paper aims to study nominal derivation in both standard Arabic and English. Standard Arabic and English are highly productive languages, and new lexemes are continually derived into their lexicons. There are many processes used to generate new lexemes from existing ones in both languages. One of these processes is derivation. Derivation is used to create new lexemes out of existing ones and these new lexemes become part of the lexicons of these languages. This paper focuses on the nominal derivation process in both languages. Nominal derivation is a lexeme formation process used to create nouns out of existing nouns, verbs or adjectives. It is a productive process which includes affixation and modification in both languages. This paper attempts to provide a unified account of Standard Arabic and English nominal derivation. It aims at exploring the lexeme formation via nominal derivation in the languages. The objective of this comparative study is to show the morphological behavior of the derived nouns in both languages. The study shows that Standard Arabic morphology is nonconcatenateive based on a nonlinear sequence of morphemes whereas English morphology is concatenative based on a linear sequence of morphemes.