Template morphology

Definition
Template morphology is a term which is used for systems of nonconcatenative morphology in which it is difficult or impossible to analyze the formation of complex words as the addition of affixes one by one to a stem. Rather, in these systems a word consists of several obligatory and optional affixes, where each obligatory affix has its own position in the string and optional affixes are slotted into this string, at the appropriate point in the sequence. Usually one finds discontinuous dependencies between affixes. Languages with template morphologies are Navajo (Young &amp; Morgan (1980)), Arabic (McCarthy (1981)), Sierra Miwok (Smith (1985)), and Yawelmani (Archangeli (1984)).

Links

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics