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THE SYNTAX OF THE ARABIC DETERMINER PHRASE by Mohamed Cheikh Beina Thesis Submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature Eastern Michigan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English Linguistics Thesis Committee: T. Daniel Seely, PhD, Chair Damir Cavar, PhD December 29, 2013 Ypsilanti, Michigan Approval THE SYNTAX OF THE ARABIC DETERMINER PHRASE by Mohamed Cheikh Beina APPROVED Dr. T. Daniel Seely_____________________________________________Date / _/____ Director Dr. Damir Cavar ______________________________________________Date / /____ Committee Member _____________________________________________Date___/___/___ Department Chair, English ____________________________________________Date___/___/____ Associate Vice President for the Graduate Studies and Research For Mom and Dad ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Had it not been for the help of my professor Dr. Daniel Seely, this thesis would have remained merely a dream. Therefore, it is with immense gratitude and appreciation that I acknowledge the support and guidance that I received from him. I have been very fortunate to have Dr. Seely as my thesis advisor. His unlimited support and kindness went to the extent that he offered me financial support when he knew indirectly that I was having some financial challenges. As for my thesis, he has been a constant source of illuminating ideas. With him, I learned how to evaluate arguments, question ideas, and express my own argument in a more appropriate manner. Without any hesitation, I acknowledge that Dr. Seely is the greatest instructor that I have ever dealt with in my educational journey. This is not to overlook my exceptional gratitude and appreciation towards my great teacher Dr. Damir Cavar. I feel honored to have worked with him on this thesis. His comments and suggestions were extremely helpful. Working with Dr. Cavar is such a blessing because of his smartness, down…

Attachments:

THE SYNTAX OF THE ARABIC DETERMINER PHRASE

by

Mohamed Cheikh Beina

Thesis

Submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature

Eastern Michigan University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English Linguistics

Thesis Committee:

T. Daniel Seely, PhD, Chair

Damir Cavar, PhD

December 29, 2013

Ypsilanti, Michigan

Approval

THE SYNTAX OF THE ARABIC DETERMINER PHRASE

by

Mohamed Cheikh Beina

 

APPROVED

Dr. T. Daniel Seely_____________________________________________Date     /    _/____

Director

Dr. Damir Cavar ______________________________________________Date     /      /____

Committee Member

_____________________________________________Date___/___/___

Department Chair, English

____________________________________________Date___/___/____

Associate Vice President for the Graduate Studies and Research

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Mom and Dad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Had it not been for the help of my professor Dr. Daniel Seely, this thesis would have remained merely a dream. Therefore, it is with immense gratitude and appreciation that I acknowledge the support and guidance that I received from him. I have been very fortunate to have Dr. Seely as my thesis advisor. His unlimited support and kindness went to the extent that he offered me financial support when he knew indirectly that I was having some financial challenges. As for my thesis, he has been a constant source of illuminating ideas. With him, I learned how to evaluate arguments, question ideas, and express my own argument in a more appropriate manner. Without any hesitation, I acknowledge that Dr. Seely is the greatest instructor that I have ever dealt with in my educational journey.

This is not to overlook my exceptional gratitude and appreciation towards my great teacher Dr. Damir Cavar. I feel honored to have worked with him on this thesis. His comments and suggestions were extremely helpful. Working with Dr. Cavar is such a blessing because of his smartness, down to earth attitude, and vast knowledge. Taking courses in computational linguistics with Dr. Cavar has had a great impact on the way I see linguistics. Before his courses, the idea that I chose the wrong major used to haunt me, but with him, my love for linguistics has grown and is still growing.

 

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the syntactic structure of the Arabic determiner phrase (DP) within the confines of Chomsky’s minimalist program. Attention is drawn to a number of the misconceptions many linguists have about this constituent. Some of the issues that most linguists overlook include the existence of an indefinite article as well as a possessive determiner that heads the genitive phrase. A new analysis of agreement within DP is presented, as well as an argument against the Construct State analysis and analyses of different other related issues.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………………………….. iv

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. v

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

Background…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

Statement of the Problem………………………………………………………………………….. 1

Purpose of the Study………………………………………………………………………………… 3

Justification and Significance……………………………………………………………………. 3

Limitations……………………………………………………………………………………………… 4

The Scope of this thesis: the Nominal Constituent……………………………………….. 4

Thesis Organization………………………………………………………………………………….. 10

CHAPTER 2: TWO NEW DETERMINERS………………………………………………………………….. 11

The Arabic Indefinite Article…………………………………………………………………….. 11

Nunation: The Indefinite Article………………………………………………… 11

Nunation: Exceptional Cases…………………………………………………….. 16

Nunation and Elipsis………………………………………………………………… 17

Nunation on Adverbs……………………………………………………………….. 23

Nunation on Proper Nouns………………………………………………………… 24

The Possessive Determiner………………………………………………………………………… 27

Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………… 33

CHAPTER 3: THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARABIC DP……………………………………………….. 35

The position of Articles and N to D Movement……………………………………………. 35

Adjective Phrases inside DP……………………………………………………………………… 39

Prepositional Phrases and Complementizer Phrases inside Arabic DP…………….. 56

Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………… 59

CHAPTER 4: The Modern Standard Arabic Construct State Reanalyzed…………………………… 60

Overview of the Construct State……………………………………………………………….. 60

Arabic Genitive Phrase……………………………………………………………………………… 64

Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………… 73

CHAPTER 5: EXTENDED ANALYSIS……………………………………………………………………….. 74

Pre-nominal Adjectives, Quantifiers, and Numerals in DP…………………………….. 74

Adjectives with DP Complement……………………………………………… 74

Pre-nominal Adjectives……………………………………………………………. 76

Quantifiers and Numerals………………………………………………………… 81

Duals and Irregular Masculine Plurals in the Genitive Phrase………………………… 83

Relative Pronouns Agreement with the head of the Matrix NP……………………… 85

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………… 89

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 96

Introduction

 Background

Arabic is a member of the Semitic languages; a subgroup of the Afro-asiatic language family. See Ruhlen (1987).  Arabic is the major language of the Semitic languages. It is spoken in over 20 countries that cover an area that spans from Oman in the Middle East to Mauritania on the eastern coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The number of its speakers as of 2013 is estimated to be 223,010,130 (Paul, Simons, & Fennig, 2013).

Arabic, nevertheless, is comprised of many dialects that have been developing and changing to the extent that some of them are not mutually intelligible anymore. The hub of this thesis is not going to be any of these spoken dialects. Rather, it is going to be Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a variety that no one speaks at home as the regular medium of communication. Chentir, Guerti, and Hirst (2008) point out that MSA is the “Unified Modern Arabic or the Standard Arabic. It is the language which is taught in the schools, and written and spoken in the official contexts.”

Speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects of Arabic tend to use MSA as a lingua franca. MSA is also the main subject of inquiry for many linguists, though dialects have been investigated.  MSA offers an abundance of unexplained phenomena and other, possibly, misunderstood ones.

Statement of the Problem

Things seem to be straightforward in English when it comes to the nominal expression. It is extensively studied, and the analyses provided for it are mostly satisfactory. In Arabic, however, things are different. This is not to say that this work is the first to address the determiner phrase in Arabic, but to say that available literature on the Arabic DP is limited.

First of all, it seems that no one of those who dealt with this issue realizes the existence of an indefinite article in Arabic. Gadalla and Abdel-Hamid (2000) as well as many other Arab linguists refer to this article as “the phenomenon of nunation,” and they provide a detailed description of its environment, but they do not explain the role it is playing in the determiner phrase. In this work, the nunation phenomenon is reanalyzed, and the Arabic indefinite article is exposed.

Moreover, it seems that linguists have not been able to detect the possessive determiner in Arabic, and as a result they refer to the genitive construction of Arabic as a mysterious construction known as “the construct state.”  Longobardi (2001) argues that this construction is determiner-less which I will argue against in this work.

The Arabic genitive construction analysis known as the construct state is not well motivated. It is more like an emergency exit for linguists who did not understand the structure of the Arabic determiner phrase. In this work, I provide an alternative analysis that clearly explains the existence of a determiner that heads phrases of this kind. I provide an analysis for the structure of these phrases, and the movements that take place inside them as well as what motivates these movements. At the same time, I propose that the genitive construction in Arabic is similar to that found in English.

The aforementioned issues are the hub that this work will revolve around in conjunction with other issues that will be brought under the spot light.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study in general is to carefully analyze the Arabic determiner phrase. This study also hopes to draw attention to many of the misconceptions related to the Arabic determiner phrase as well as provide a scientific analysis supported with sound evidence for the relevant issues to advance the understanding of this syntactic constituent.

Specifically speaking, I aim at drawing the attention of the linguistic community to a number of things that include the presence of two more determiners in Arabic that I have not been able to see any mention of anywhere in the available literature. These two determiners are the indefinite article and the possessive determiner that heads the genitive phrase know as the Construct State.

In the light of discovering the possessive determiner, I will argue against the currently dominant approach of explaining the genitive construction in Arabic known as “the Construct State.”

In Chapter five, I discuss atypical cases of MSA DP in general. These cases are going to be examples of DPs or aspects of certain DPs that seem to contradict the general line of argument that I will be following. I discuss these cases in a separate chapter to be able to allocate enough attention to them, and to avoid unnecessary complexity where possible.

Justification and Significance

The linguists who have been exploring the Arabic language have been unearthing numerous phenomena in its syntax that are hard to explain. However, when this syntax is broken down to its elementary components, things will start to fall in place. Based on this approach, the focus of this thesis is on Arabic DPs only because understanding the Arabic DP is a corner stone in pushing the understanding of Arabic syntax forward.

This work does not simply argue against the prevailing and poorly supported hypotheses that address aspects of Arabic DP, it also provides alternative ones that make more sense and are much simpler.

Limitations

This work faces a number of limitations the most challenging of which is the fact that I am analyzing a component of Arabic syntax using the English language as medium of communication between me and the reader. Arabic and English are very different from one another in just about everything including syntax. For that, it is going to be hard to drive some points home to readers who understand Arabic, let alone those, who do not due to the numerous operations in Arabic that are not found in English and vice versa.

Finding references in Arabic that deal with this topic has also proven to be a challenge. Most of the available and relevant literature in Arabic is either descriptive or prescriptive. It lacks theoretical analysis in the frame-work of generative syntax.

As for the available literature in English, few linguists have dealt with the Arabic DP which makes relevant references hard to come by.

The Scope of this thesis: the Nominal Constituent

The scope of this work is extends to the structure of the determiner phrase (DP) in Arabic.  The central goal is to provide a detailed analysis of this structure. But, before I delve into the details of Arabic DP, I begin with an introduction to the concept of DP.

A DP is a nominal constituent that was traditionally believed to be headed by the noun inside it and specified by a determiner. For those who adopted this analysis, a constituent like “the man” was regarded as a noun phrase (NP) where the noun “man” is the head of the constituent, and the determiner “the” is occupying the specifier position of the constituent. However, this proposal has recently been challenged on a number of grounds, both conceptual and empirical.

First of all, X-bar theory dictates that specifier positions can be occupied by only phrasal elements, as Bernstein (2003) points out. Moreover, X-bar requires that all non-head materials be phrasal (Carnie, 2013). This, in turn, implies that all content categories as well as functional categories project. Therefore, if determiners are not phrases, they cannot be specifiers, and if they are not heads of phrases they must be phrases. This means that the D in the spec of NP hypothesis is not valid; it is not consistent with X-bar theory. An alternative and very motivated analysis was provided by Abney (1987). In his proposal, Abney argued that nominal constructions are headed by determiners, which means that the maximal projection would be DP (Determiner Phrase).

It is worth-mentioning that determiners unlike other parts of speech are motivated purely on syntactic basis. Unlike parts of speech with lexical content, determiner do not undergo word formation processes nor do they take inflectional morphemes. Moreover, determiners can head not only DPs that are nominal constituents, but also DPs that are sentential or gerundive.

Another piece of evidence for an articulated structure of DP is the fact that possessive determiners in English are in complementary distribution with other determiners like “the” and “a/an,”as Carnie (2013) states. This complementary relationship is also found in Arabic as I will point out in this work. Consider, for instance, the following phrases:

1)         a.   The professor’s approach

b. * the professor’s the approach

Why does the phrase in (1 a) become ungrammatical when we add the determiner “the” between “‘s” and the possessee as in (1 b)?  In fact, it’s ungrammatical with any second determiner:   *the professor’s an/my/each approach.  One thing that we can safely deduce from this is that “‘s” is in complementary distribution with other determiners and as Carnie (2013) adds, “when two items are in complementary distribution, they are instances of the same thing.”  Abney (1987) concludes that the possessive ‘s is itself a determiner, and since there is only one determiner per phrase, structures like (1b) are correctly excluded.

Now that it has been explained that “‘s” is a determiner, let’s see how a nominal constituent like the one example (1 a) can be represented in X-bar schema. First, this cannot be done following the assumption that determiners are in the spec of the noun phrases?  Consider these possible representations, from Carnie (2013).

2)

Consider the tree branches above; there is no way to bring these two constituents together without violating x-bar rules. If we assume that the two NPs are daughters of another NP, then it would be problematic to decide which NP projects to the maximal projection. Moreover, every NP will be functioning as a specifier that does not specify a head. Abney (1987) points out that “a restrictive version of X-bar theory…requires all phrases to be headed.” Thus having an NP that does not have a head will cause the derivation to crash. The conclusion that we can take from this is that something is wrong with the proposal. Clearly, it is the position of the determiner as a specifier. The assumption that determiners are specifiers of NPs is less plausible.

The alternative proposal of Abney (1987) is that Determiners are DP heads that take NP as a complement as well as other types of syntactic constituents that have a nominal character. If we use the DP approach, things will be straightforward as in the following structure.

3)

From the discussion above, we can deduce that determiners are not specifiers of NPs, but actually are heads of their own phrases. We see that the assumption that determiners are not specifiers of NPs provides more plausible explanations for the observations: mutually-exclusive distribution, strict left-peripheral position in the constituent, etc. It is also borne out that NPs are generated inside DPs as complements.

Here we are talking about basic DPs, but before I consider more complex ones, here is a question that arises:  Why is it that the NP is assumed to function as a complement of D and not an adjunct?  In X-bar theoretic terms, the structural difference between an adjunct and a complement is that a complement is a sister to X and daughter of X? while an adjunct is a sister of X? and a daughter of X?.

Theoretically speaking, Complements and adjuncts behave differently and have contrasting properties. One feature that these two constituents diverge with respect to is optionality; adjuncts are optional while complements are obligatory (Dowty 2003). In light of this, we can safely assume that an NP functions as a complement of D since it is obligatory as illustrated below.

4)         a. the professor’s approach

b. * the ‘s approach

c. You like Dave’s professor, while I like Mary’s.

The ungrammaticality of (4 b) is the result of omitting the NP professor. This is evidence that the NP is a complement of the determiner “the,” and cannot be an adjunct. Note, however, that in ellipsis, we can omit the NP complement of D as in (4 c), but in this case the NP is eliminated only at PF (phonological form) while it is present structurally.

A DP, however, is not always composed of a determiner and a simple NP. A DP can be very complex as in the following examples.

5)         a. The smart professor

b. The man in the picture

c. A small business owner (Notice the ambiguity)

d. The woman I met yesterday while studying for my finals in the library

In (5 a), we have the complement of the determiner modified by an adjective phrase. In (5 b), the complement is modified by a prepositional phrase. In (5 c), the complement is modified by an adjective phrase and a noun phrase. Notice that the adjective in this phrase can be modifying “business,” but it can also be modifying “owner” which makes the phrase ambiguous. (5 d) is an example of a very complex DP which complement has an adjunct in the form of complementizer phrase (CP).

There is little or no literature about the above complex Arabic DP structure, but in this thesis, I hope to bring them under the spotlight to produce analyses that account for their basic structure and the transformations that lead to their surface structure.

Thesis Organization

In this introductory chapter, I provided a general background about the topic, the statement of the problem, the purpose of the study, justification and significance, and limitations of the study. In addition, I laid the theoretical foundations that I will base my analyses on.

In Chapter two, I argue for the presence of two Arabic determiners; the indefinite article and a possessive determiner that heads the genitive phrase traditionally known as the construct state. It seems that there is very limited literature, if any, about these two determiners which makes them worth exploring.

In Chapter three, I provide a number of detailed analyses that account for the structure of Arabic DP in all its manifestations. I start with simple DP phrases with no modificational elements and develop the chapter to include very complex DPs.

In Chapter four, I provide a counter analysis for the currently prevailing construct state analysis. In this chapter, I argue that the possessive determiner introduced in Chapter two is the head of this kind of phrases, and this nullifies the main foundation of the construct state analysis namely the absence of any determiner.

In Chapter five, I go back to exceptional cases that I did not discuss in the previous chapters or just mentioned briefly to preserve the simplicity of the analyses I provide, and to generate a more general theory that accounts for more. In this chapter, I deeply analyze these cases and connect the dots in my theory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2: Two New Determiners

The available literature on an Arabic indefinite article and a possessive determiner that heads the genitive phrase is very limited, if any is there. In this chapter, I discuss various pieces of evidence that constitute strong indications that these two determiners do exist. In the first section, the Arabic indefinite article is analyzed, while the possessive determiner is discussed in second part of the chapter.

The Arabic Indefinite Article

Nunation: the Indefinite Article

In Arabic, there is a phenomenon known as Nunation that linguists and Arabic grammarians have not fully investigated. It seems that those who wrote about this phenomenon have not been able to unveil its complete syntactic structure

Nunation, as Jahawi (1905) defines it, is the affixation of an /-n/ to the end of nouns as in the following example:

1)            kitab-u-n

book-Nom-Nunation

“a book”

There are, however, many other syntactic categories that host this suffix. These hosts include but are not limited to Adjectives.

The Nunation phenomenon in Arabic is very productive. In addition to expressing indefiniteness, it is also used to express a variety of other semantic properties. In this work a detailed analysis of nunation is provided, and it is argued that nunation, with respect to one important use of it, is an indefinite article.   Dobrovie-Sorin (2002) regards nunation as the indefinite article but does not provide evidence to support that. In this chapter, evidence is provided to justify this claim.

I argue that the suffix /-n/ is an indefinite article that attaches to nouns and adjectives after the case marker to mark indefiniteness. This argument is based on the fact that /-n/ is in complementary distribution with /el-/, which is a definite article as the following examples indicate.

2)

el-k?ta?b the-book “the book”	d.    el-bejt the-house “the house”	g.     el-q?l?m the-pen “the pen”
k?ta?b-u-n book-NOM-Indef “a book”	e.       bejt-u-n house-NOM-Indef “a house”	h.      q?l?m-u-n pen-NOM-Indef “a pen”
*el-k?ta?b-u-n the-book-NOM-Indef *”the a book”	f.       *el-bejt-u-n the-house-NOM-Indef *”the a house”	*el- q?l?m-u-n the-pen-NOM-Indef *”the a pen”

As you can see in the three sets of examples above, a), d) and g) are grammatical. They all host the definite article “el-.” Examples b), e) and h) are also grammatical. All of them have the morpheme /-n/ as a suffix, and all of them have an indefinite interpretation. Examples c), f) and i), however, are ungrammatical. This ungrammaticality can be attributed to the co-attachment of both the definite article /el-/ with the morpheme “-n.” Note that this ungrammaticality cannot be attributed to the co-attachment of both /el-/ and the nominative marker which is present in all three examples; this is because /el-/ and the nominative marker can perfectly attach to the same root as in the following example.

3)     el-bejt-u         ?a?m?n.

the-house-Nom        safe

“The house is safe.”

This leaves us with /el/ and /n/. It seems that it is ungrammatical to have the two affixes attached to the same noun. Only one of them can be attached. This means that these two affixes are in complementary distribution, and as Carnie (2013) states, “When two items are in complementary distribution, they are instances of the same thing.” Hence, we come to the conclusion that /-n/ and /el-/ are instances of the same thing. /el-/ marks definiteness while /-n/ marks indefiniteness.

Pragmatics provides us with further evidence that /-n/ is an indefinite article. In the following example, I provide a context in which I introduce a noun phrase with the suffix /-n/. Then, in a subsequent sentence, I use /-n/ with the same noun phrase to see if it remains compatible with it. If not, we can say that the test presents evidence that /-n/ marks indefinites.

4) a.  ra?ejtu        ra?ul-a-n

saw(1stSgPast)        man-Acc-n(indefinite)

“I saw a man”

b. *ra?ul-u-n         bada?     mari?d?an

man-Nom-n