Investigating the syntactic structure of Arabic sentences

In this paper, we employ the Government and Binding theory (GB) to present a system that analyzes the syntactic structure of some simple Arabic sentences structures. We consider different word orders in Arabic and show how they are derived. We include an analysis of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), Verb-Subject-Object (VSO), nominal sentences, nominal sentences with inna (or sisters), and question sentences. We use the analysis to develop syntactic rules for a fragment of Arabic, such that we include two sets of rules (1) rules on sentences structures that do not account for case and (2) rules on sentences structures that account for Noun Phrases (NPs) case. We present an implementation of the grammar rules in prolog. The results of testing the system t were reasonable with a high accuracy especially when the input sentences are tagged with identification of end cases.