A study of the syntax of literary Arabic

Abstract

In recent years the spoken dialects of Arabic have had the lion's share of linguistic analysis while Literary Arabic has recefved relatively little notice. This study is an attempt to redress the balance by presenting a transformational account of some of the basic syntactic structures of Literary Arabic. Chapter l contains a brief descripti·on of the historical development of Arabic and pinpoints the form of the language studied here. Also discussed is a particular problem affecting the choice of data used in a study of Literary Arabic. In Chapter 2 we present a treatment of noun phrases. Our analysis deals with simple and complex noun phrases and we postulate an analysis for the construct state which involves the embedding of a noun phrase within a noun phrase. The problems of definiteness marking in relation to the various expansions of the noun phrase are discussed, as well as the ordering of adjective phrases. A transformational rule is postulated for genitive case marking in construct states and prepositional phrases. Noun classes are discussed and we put forward the idea of an inanimate class for some plurals. Finally we deal with features on nouns and noun phrases and suggest a convention for the correct distribution of those features. Chapter 3 establishes the basic order of noncopulative clauses and goes on to describe the topical isation of noun phrases, a process where a definite noun phrase is fronted, leaving a coreferential pronoun at the removal site. The topicalisation of noun phrases 1s extended to subjects to account for subject-initial clauses; this fnvolves a reinterpretation of the verb inflection system as a bound pronoun system. Rules are presented to account for the cliticization of object pronouns and for accusative case marking. The chapter closes with a discussion of multiple topical isation. Noncopulative clauses are treated in Chapter 4. The three varieties - clauses with 'become' verbs, verbal copula ·clauses and verbless copula clauses - are discussed in terms of constraints on movement. We refer to Kuno's notion of nonreferentiality in dealing with the motivation for these constraints. Verbless copula clauses are seen to be generated by the same processes that generate verbal clauses, with the addition of a copula deletion rule. Our discussion of the 'pronoun of separation' leads to the closing section of the chapter, where a solution is presented for a problem of multiple topicalisation raised in Chapter 3. Chapter 5 deals with adjective phrases, opening with a discussion of the morphology of nouns and adjectives. A semantic criterion is postulated to distinguish between the two categories. The last part of the chapter analyses the false construct state, an interesting variety of adjective phrase that masquerades as a noun phrase. Chapter 6 discusses relativization. The behaviour of restrictive relative clauses and the relative 'pronoun' are described and we conclude that relative clauses in Literary Arabic closely parallel adjective phrases. We end by postulating a phrase structure rule that reflects that parallelism.