The functional categories and phrase structure of Sason Arabic

Abstract

The study aims to investigate primarily the functional categories and the phrase structure of Sason Arabic. Adopting the main premises of the Minimalist Program, I analyze the syntactic representations of functional projections, relying on the morphological properties of the language. Sason Arabic displays different properties across sentence types, hence following Akkuş and Benmamoun (2014) I argue that Sason Arabic exhibits both the head initial and head final properties. In this study, the initial step was to examine the tense projection with the aim of explaining the morpho-syntactic properties of elements that can occupy it. The description of tense elements and the verbal morphology led to the analysis of the syntax of complex tense in SA. Based on the discussion of several instances of tense syncretism, mainly following Stowell 1996, 2005, Giorgi and Pianesi 1997, I argued for a bi-layeral TP analysis, where the lower layer projects two separate Ts. The main motivations for this analysis came from the past particle kə-, exclusive to SA, and the different function of kwn from other Arabic varieties. In addition, I discussed the representation of sentential negation in Sason Arabic and concluded that the order of negation relative to tense seems to be different in copular and non-copular sentences (Akkuş and Benmamoun 2014). The investigation shed light on the influence of language contact on the clause structure of Sason Arabic, that is, the head-directionality and the position of negation relative to tense. I also suggested that the pronominal element which shows up in positive and negative sentences be best treated as Pron in the sense of Doron (1983, 1986) due to its distributional and morphophonological properties. Finally, I examined possible word-order variations in the Sason Arabic depending on the information structure of the sentence and discussed their syntactic derivations within the phrase structure that I proposed in this study. This examination included the position of subjects and the derivation of CLLDed elements.