Abstract
This paper discusses some data of Arabic synthetic compounds in which regular plural inflection is included inside compounds. These data pose problems to Kiparsky's (1982) level-ordering lexical morphology model and Li's (1990) generalization on verb incorporation. I argue that such compounds are lexically formed based on some pieces of evidence. To support the analysis, I compare the compounds and the construct state constructions in Arabic and Hebrew. Then I show that the lexical analysis explains the morphological, syntactic properties, and the semantics of Arabic synthetic compounds. More specifically, I explain how the lexical analysis applies to theta-role assignment inside the compound and then discuss the number specification of the non-head in the compound of Arabic and English.