PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In this dissertation, I apply a theory of semantic composition, as introduced by Marcus Kracht, to represent the meaning of Arabic sentences. Kracht’s theory is a modification of Kees Vermeulen’s work on referent systems. In Kracht’s approach, the renaming process of variables is not decided by directionality, as suggested in the original version of referent systems, but by the morphosyntactic information associated with each variable. Arabic morphological constituents are allowed to be discontinuous, which maintains the pure surface treatment on the one hand and proves the possibility to save the concatenative paradigm for Arabic morphology on the other. An empty string is proposed in cases of null-subject or covert copula clauses, specifically challenging constructions of Arabic syntax. The semantics of Arabic temporal morphosyntactic markers is represented depending on Wolfgang Klein’s theory of tense. As a part of my work, I develop a computational lexicon for a fragment of Arabic depending on the proposed analysis.