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Information about Construct State

The status constructus or construct state is a noun form occurring in Afro-Asiatic languages. It is particularly common in Semitic languages (such as Arabic and Hebrew), Berber languages, and in the extinct Egyptian language. It occurs when a semantically definite noun (marked by the definite article the in English translation) is succeeded by another noun in a genitive relation to the first.

Arabic

In Arabic grammar, the status constructus is called الإضافة al-iḍāfa (lit. "addition, annexion").

The construct is one of the three states of nouns in Arabic, the other two being the status absolutus (indefinite state) and the status emphaticus (definite state; also called the status determinatus). Concretely, the three states compare like this:
  • ˀummun — "a mother"
  • ˀ(a)l-ˀummu — "the mother"
  • ˀummu — "the mother of"
  • ˀUmmun jamilah — "A mother is beautiful" (by definition, for instance because of her persistent devotion)
  • ˀAl-ˀummu jamilah — "The mother is beautiful" (e.g. despite her age and the fact that she bore several children)
  • ˀUmmu 'l-shaykhi jamilah — "The sheikh's mother is beautiful".
In Classical Arabic, words in the status constructus do not occur with the article al, nor do they receive an -n after their case marking vowel (nunation). When the following word begins with an article, however, dialectic and colloquial Arabic do allow this; in such a case, the above example would be ˀUmm-'al-shaikh jamillah.

Hebrew

In Hebrew grammar, the status constructus is known as smikhut (סמיכות, lit. "contiguity").
  • bayit — "(a) house"
  • habayit — "the house"
  • bet — "house of"
  • sefer — "(a) book"
  • bet sefer — "(a) school" (literally "house of (a) book")
  • bet hasefer — "the school" (literally "house of the book")

See also

Examples
A proper or common noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. As usual, a `*' in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
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For other uses, see Morphology.
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
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Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family (Languages of Africa) with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of
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Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 300 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. They constitute the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only branch of this group spoken in Asia.
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al-‘Arabiyyah in written Arabic (Kufic script):  
Pronunciation: /alˌʕa.raˈbij.ja/
Spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman,
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Hebrew}}} 
Writing system: Alefbet Ivri abjad 
Official status
Official language of:  Israel
Regulated by: Academy of the Hebrew Language

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Berber languages / Tamazight are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. A very sparse population extends into the whole Sahara and the northern part of the Sahel. They belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum.
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 Egyptian}}} 
Writing system: hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally Arabic script in government translations)
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: egy
ISO 639-3: egy
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In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and entities which are not (indefinite noun phrases).
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article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. The three main articles in the English language are the, an and a.
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In grammar, the genitive case or possessive case (also called the second case) is the case that marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun.
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Arabic is a Semitic language. See Arabic language for more information on the language in general. This article describes the grammar of Classical Arabic.

History

Due to the rapid expansion of Islam in the 8th century, many people learned Arabic as a lingua franca.
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Classical Arabic, also known as Koranic (or Qur'anic) Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in the Qur'an as well as in numerous literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries).
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In some Semitic languages, notably Arabic, nunation is the addition of a final -n to a noun or adjective to indicate that it is fully declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness.
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This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.
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This article has been tagged since July 2007.
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In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (a word) that consists of more than one other lexeme.

An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning.
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In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and entities which are not (indefinite noun phrases).
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