Psych construction types in Arabic as root-based in templatic morphosyntax

Abstract We motivate the view that Arabic psych construction types originate as root phrases, devoid of categorial specifications, rather than verbal phrases, as commonly assumed. It is shown that roots are categorially and ontologically flexible, and that valency affixes are arguably roots, not categorical templates . Furthermore, the root/template divide, as defended by many authors, can only be construed as morphonological, once implemented in Distributed Morphology, rather than morphosyntactic. One advantage of our approach over the category (or vP) based approach is that it can apply on equal bases to all categories alike, because roots are acategorial , and psych expressions are not limited only to verb phrases. This is supported cross-linguistically by the existence of psych nominals or adjectives that have no verbal source. More motivation for the root hypothesis comes the root ontological flexibility, their complexity in valency increasing or decreasing morphosyntactic alternations, as well as from investigating adicity limitations on psych nominals, compared to those of psych (causative) verbs.