Classifying Arabic Verbs Using Sibling Classes

In the effort of building a verb lexicon classifying the most used verbs in Arabic and providing information about their syntax and semantics (Mousser, 2010), the problem of classes over-generation arises because of the overt morphology of Arabic, which codes not only agreement and inflection relations but also semantic information related to thematic arity or other semantic information like ”intensity”, ”pretension”, etc. The hierarchical structure of verb classes and the inheritance relation between their subparts expels derived verbs from the main class, although they share most of its properties. In this article we present a way to adapt the verb class approach to a language with a productive (verb) morphology by introducing sibling classes.