Pubblicato 05/16/2023
Parole chiave
- Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic,
- plural formation,
- Measure Phrase,
- Division Phrase,
- Determiner Phrase
Come citare
Copyright (c) 2023 Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/4.0/88x31.png)
Questo lavoro è fornito con la licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 Internazionale.
Abstract
This paper investigates the morphosyntax of the plural marker -a:t in Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic from a generative viewpoint. We find that it has a diverse nature as it has several functions related mainly to the syntax of the relevant DP. It is a divider with count nouns, a counter with singulatives, a measuring head with mass nouns, and a category-assigning head in the derivational domain of some adjectives. Further, it acts as a transparent DP-adjunct with some nouns referring to parts of the day. Hence, this paper argues, against part of the literature on this subject, that the plural does not possess a unique syntactic position. The diverse nature of this marker adds to the growing body of research suggesting that some categories that were thought to be solely inflectional and with a unique function and syntactic position, including number (particularly plural), gender and diminutives, are in fact functionally and morphosyntactically heterogeneous in natural languages.
Riferimenti bibliografici
- Abels, Klaus, Ad Neeleman. 2006. “Universal 20 without the LCA.” University of Tromsø.
- Borer, Hagit. 2005. In name only: Structuring sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Butler, K. Lindsay. 2012. “Crosslinguistic and experimental evidence for non-number plurals.” Linguistic Variation 12(1): 27–56.
- Doetjes, Jenny, Ana Arregui, and Crit Cremers. 1996. “Mass and count: syntax or semantics?” Proceedings of Meaning on the HIL 34–52.
- Erwin, Wallace M. 1962. A short reference grammar of Iraqi Arabic. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
- Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2012. Key features and parameters in Arabic grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing feminine to mean gender, number, numeral and quantifier extensions in Arabic. USA: Lexington Books.
- Gillon, Carrie. 2015. “Innu-aimun plurality.” Lingua 162: 128–148.
- Harrell, Richard Slade. 2004. A short reference grammar of Moroccan Arabic. With audio CD. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
- Jaradat, Abdulazeez, Marwan Jarrah. 2022a. “The syntax of plurals of collective and mass nouns: Views from Jordanian Arabic.” Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 58 (3): 509–539.
- Jarrah, Marwan, Abdulazeez Jaradat. 2022b. “The syntax of the diminutive morpheme-aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic.” Linguistics Vanguard 8(1): 69–81.
- Jarrah, Marwan, Jaradat Abdulazeez, Linda Alkhawaja. 2022. “The position of the broken plural in the grammar: Rural Jordanian Arabic as a case study.” Lingua 265: 103165.
- Jarrah, Marwan, Aseel Zibin. 2016. “Syntactic investigation of nunation in Haili Arabic”. SKY Journal of Linguistics 29.
- Mathieu, Eric. 2014. “Many a Plural.” In Weak Referentiality, edited by Ana, Aguilar Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn and Joost Zwarts, 151–181. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Mathieu, Éric. 2012a. “Flavors of division”. Linguistic Inquiry, 43(4): 650–679.
- Mathieu, Éric. 2012b. “The mass/count distinction in Ojibwe.” In Count and Mass across Languages, edited by D. Massam, 172–198. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Ojeda, Almerindo. 1992. “The semantics of number in Arabic”. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 2: 303-326.
- Picallo, M. Carme. 1991. “Nominals and Nominalization in Catalan.” Probus 3: 279–316.
- Ritter, Elizabeth. 1991. “Two functional categories in Modern Hebrew Noun Phrases.” In Perspectives on Phrase Structure: Heads and Licensing, Syntax and Semantics 25, edited by Susan D. Rothstein, 37–60. New York: Academic Press.
- Steriopolo, Olga. 2017. “Syntactic variation in diminutive suffixes: Russian, Kolyma Yukaghir, and Itelmen”. Languages, 2(4), 23.
- Talmoudi, Fathi. 1980. The Arabic dialect of Sûsa (Tunisia). Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
- Tsoulas, George. 2007. “On the grammar of number and mass terms in Greek.” MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 49: 239–266.
- Valois, Daniel. 1991. The internal syntax of DP. PhD dissertation, Los Angeles, UCLA.
- Wiltschko, Martina. 2012. “Decomposing the mass/count distinction: evidence from languages that lack it”. In Count and Mass Across Languages: edited by Diane Massam, 146–171. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Wiltschko, Martina, Olga Steriopolo. 2007. “Parameters of variation in the syntax of diminutives”. Proceedings of the 2007 Canadian linguistics association annual conference, 1: 1–12. Canadian Linguistic Association.
- Wiltschko, Martina. 2008. “The syntax of non-inflectional plural marking.” Natural language & linguistic theory 26 (3): 639–694.
- Zabbal, Youri. 2002. The semantics of number in the Arabic noun phrase. Unpublished MA Thesis, Calgary, University of Calgary.