Features between form and interpretation : the effect of animacy, gender, and number on verbal agreement
This thesis critically analyses the intriguing behaviour of plural inanimate nouns triggering partial agreement in subjectâverbâobject (SVO) word order in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The analysis focuses on three significant morphosyntactic features of agreement: animacy, gender and number. I follow integrated theoretical assumptions of current Minimalism and Distributed Morphology (DM). I operate on the consonantal root-and-pattern property of MSA to argue for a DM approach to feature analysis. I argue that assignment of gender values takes place during syntax before PF whereas the exponence of agreement features takes place post-syntactically at phonological form. I argue for a decompositional analysis for the structure of determiner phrase (DP) in which agreement features are not located at the same syntactic head within the nominal. Following Ritter (1993) and Zabbal (2002), number heads its own syntactic projection, and thus number phrase (NumP) is the syntactic locus for inflectional number values of the nominal. I argue for two locations for number values: NumP, which hosts the distributive reading, and n, which hosts the collective reading interpretation. I also argue for a decompositional analysis
Benduhaish, Sara Omar A.
Features between form and interpretation : the effect of animacy, gender, and number on verbal agreement. This thesis critically analyses the intriguing behaviour of plural inanimate nouns triggering partial agreement in subjectâverbâobject (SVO) word order in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The analysis focuses on three significant morphosyntactic features of agreement: animacy, gender and number. I follow integrated theoretical assumptions of current Minimalism and Distributed Morphology (DM). I operate on the consonantal root-and-pattern property of MSA to argue for a DM approach to feature analysis. I argue that assignment of gender values takes place during syntax before PF whereas the exponence of agreement features takes place post-syntactically at phonological form. I argue for a decompositional analysis for the structure of determiner phrase (DP) in which agreement features are not located at the same syntactic head within the nominal. Following Ritter (1993) and Zabbal (2002), number heads its own syntactic projection, and thus number phrase (NumP) is the syntactic locus for inflectional number values of the nominal. I argue for two locations for number values: NumP, which hosts the distributive reading, and n, which hosts the collective reading interpretation. I also argue for a decompositional analysis
features form interpretation effect gender number verbal_agreement critically_analyse intrigue behaviour plural noun trigger partial agreement subject_verb object svo word_order modern_standard arabic_msa analysis focus_three significant morphosyntactic feature agreement gender number follow integrated theoretical_assumption current minimalism morphology operate consonantal root and pattern property msa argue feature analysis argue assignment gender value take_place syntax whereas agreement_feature take_place post syntactically phonological form argue analysis structure determiner_phrase agreement_feature locate syntactic head within nominal following number head syntactic projection thus number phrase syntactic locus inflectional number value nominal argue location number value host distributive reading host collective read interpretation also_argue analysis