Nonconcatenative morphology is an account of morphology developed in the 1980s by J. J. McCarthy and inspired by Autosegmental phonology. It works well in representing vowel harmony, reduplication and systems such as Semitic consonantal roots. For example, depending on the vowels, the Arabic consonantal root k-t-b can have different but semantically-related meanings. Thus, 'he wrote' and [kita:b 'book' both come from the root k-t-b. In the analysis provided by nonconcatenative morphology, the consonantal root is assigned to one tier, and the vowel pattern to another.

See also

• Autosegmental phonology

Linguistic morphology | Semitic linguistics