A Minimalist Account of Word Order and Agreement Variation in Arabic

The present paper discusses word order (variation) in both Standard and Tunisian Arabic, which has a similar syntactic behaviour as most other Arabic dialects. The discussion includes the difference in the two varieties' unmarked order in verbal sentences, the VSO/SVO variation they both exhibit, and the change of agreement that correlates with word order variation in Standard Arabic. The variation in word order in both varieties and the agreement asymmetry in MSA are explained within the new developments of transformational syntax (Chomsky, 1999; 2000), whose main changes include the disappearance of the functional category Agr. The proposed analysis saves the findings reached in previous studies within the Principles and Parameters framework (P&P) or in the early Minimalist Program (MP) (Chomsky, 1995) in relation to word order, namely that the basic order in both languages is the same and the variation is due to a parametric choice in the element that moves. A new analysis is, however, proposed in relation to the asymmetry in agreement in MSA.

[1]  Akkal Ahmed.  SYNTACTIC DERIVATION OF THE INFLECTIONS OF THE VERB IN MOROCCAN ARABIC , 1993 .

[2]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  The Minimalist Program , 1992 .

[3]  Dominique Sportiche,et al.  Agreement, word order and conjunction in some varieties of Arabic , 1994 .

[4]  Jean-Yves Pollock.  Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP , 1989 .

[5]  Alec Marantz,et al.  The minimalist program , 1995 .

[6]  E. Anagnostopoulou,et al.  Parametrizing Agr: Word Order, V-Movement and Epp-Checking , 1998 .

[7]  Elabbas Benmamoun,et al.  The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects , 2000 .

[8]  A. Holmberg.  Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting: How Any Category Can Become an Expletive , 2000, Linguistic Inquiry.

[9]  Dominique Sportiche.  A theory of floating quantifiers and its corollaries for constituent structure , 1988 .

[10]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering , 2015 .

[11]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Minimalist inquiries : the framework , 1998 .

[12]  Naomi Bolotin,et al.  Arabic and parametric VSO agreement , 1995 .

[13]  Jean-Yves Pollock,et al.  Notes on Clause Structure , 1997 .

[14]  Dominique Sportiche,et al.  The position of subjects , 1991 .

[15]  U. Shlonsky.  Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax , 1997 .

[16]  Mohammad A. Mohammad.  The problem of subject-verb agreement in Arabic: towards a solution , 1990 .

[17]  Marianne Mithun,et al.  Is basic word order universal , 1987 .

[18]  Noam Chomsky.  Derivation by phase , 1999 .

[19]  B. Plunkett.  The position of subjects in modern Standard Arabic , 1993 .

[20]  Jamal Ouhalla,et al.  Remarks on Focus in Standard Arabic , 1997 .

[21]  L. Haegeman.  Elements of Grammar , 1997 .

[22]  E. Woolford,et al.  VP-internal subjects in VSO and nonconfigurational languages , 1991 .