An Analysis of Simple and Construct-State Noun Phrases in Modern Standard Arabic (original) (raw)

Arabic Nominals In HPSG: A Verbal Noun Perspective

makino.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr

Semitic languages exhibit rich nonconcatenative mor-phological operations, which can generate a myriad of derivational lexemes. Especially, the root-pattern mor-phology in Arabic verbs demonstrates the constructions of several verb-derived nominals (verbal nouns) such as gerund, active ...

Nominal Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic With Reference to English

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 2019

The aim of this study is to investigate nominal constructions of modern standard Arabic in terms of their types, their patterns and selectional restrictions and compare them with their counterparts in English so as to arrive at points that will be productive for pedagogical and translation purposes. The analysis of the data focuses on morphsyntactic processes to see in order to show the constructions morphologically as one word nominal or syntactically as a group of nouns in nominal positions. The objective of this study is to provide an account on a specific syntactic structure with special reference to English, in efforts to promote the importance of modern standard Arabic studies as an appropriate mean to better understand the standard and formal form of a language. The study concludes with the investigation as well as the main conclusions reached and offers a suggestion for further studies.

The Structure of the Determiner Phrase in Moroccan Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

International Journal of Linguistics Studies (IJLS), 2023

This study analyzes the structure of the determiner phrase (DP) in Moroccan Arabic (MA) within the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP). The study focuses on the determiners, adjectives, and possessives within the DP. The findings show that the determination of definiteness or indefiniteness of the noun is crucial and affects the structure of the DP. In this respect, the head of the DP possesses a definiteness feature; thus, noun movement to the determiner position is triggered by both the definiteness feature and the Minimal Link Condition (MLC). Adjective phrases in the DP are analyzed through the functional category AgrP to satisfy the features of the nouns and adjectives locally. Specifically, the uninterpreted features of case, gender, and number are carried in the head of AgrP, and movement is triggered by the need to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and to allow for feature checking while respecting the MLC principle. The paper argues that Carnie's (2013) arguments about the possessive DP are inadequate to account for MA and proposes the insertion of a functional projection "PossP" that dominates the whole DP, enabling the genitive case to be assigned to the possessor DP. The study shows that the MP approach is adequate in analyzing the DP structure in MA, the operations MOVE and MERGE, and the EPP and MLC principles play essential roles in forming DP structures. The paper also notes that when elements move, they leave behind a copy of the model element to preserve the original semantic interpretation.

Noun Formation in Standard English and Modern Standard Arabic: A Contrastive Study

Journal of Language Teaching and …, 2010

This paper focuses on analyzing and contrasting the processes of noun-formation in both Standard English (English) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), in order to reveal the similarities and differences between them and their potential productivity for pedagogical purposes. The data for the present study has been collected from different sources, compiled and analyzed in terms of morphology, productivity and semantic indications of the different processes of noun-formation in both languages. It is found that both English and MSA reveal a common linguistic phenomenon in noun-formation processes as well as their exploitation of the language by forming productive rules and patterns. The similarities are found in some general universals, such as affixation, compounding, blending, onomatopoeia, borrowing, diminutives, conversion and acronyms. Every language has regular rules for noun-formation, but some irregular forms may also exist in both of them.

The Noun Phrase in Gulf Pidgin Arabic

to be published in 'Awraq Lisaaniyya 'Linguistic Papers'

This study is a descriptive account of the grammatical properties of the noun phrase in Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA), a reduced linguistic system widely in use in the region of the Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. The description deals with the morphological and the syntactic properties of each of the components of this phrasal category; the head noun, the determiner system, demonstratives, definiteness, quantification, and the system of noun modifiers, pre- and post- noun modifiers and possessive constructions. It also discusses the grammatical categories that are closely linked to them, such as case, gender and number, and how these are signaled. The description is placed within the context of the corresponding phrases in the lexifier Gulf Arabic and the substrate languages, which shows clearly that GPA differs significantly from them. The properties that the GPA noun phrase exhibits seem to stem from general features and tendencies that characterize the structure of pidgins in the world. Thus, we argue that these structural properties ascertain the pidgin status of GPA and establish the developmental stage of this pidgin system in relation to other pidgin systems.

On Definiteness and Beyond : a Contrastive Analysis of Nominal Determination in English and Arabic

2014

This thesis offers a contrastive analysis of the notion of definiteness as conveyed by the system of the article in English and Standard Arabic. Definiteness and other notions associated with it are investigated semantically and syntactically in an attempt to discover how these two languages approach such notions and when the two languages converge and diverge in this respect. To this end, corpus analysis is chosen as a means to inspect these ideas. The corpus, The Brook Kerith, by the Irish writer, George Moore, is chosen for geo-historical and literary reasons: the story takes place in the Holy Land at the dawn of this Christian era. A contrastive analysis of the first chapter along with its translation is analyzed from a pragmatic and semantic perspective. The analysis is followed by statistical and computational analyses. It is found that the article “the” and the Arabic article “al’ are used for seemingly the same purpose in the proportion of 76%. The occurrence of the article ...

Development of Arabic Noun Phrase

2017

Extracting key phrases from documents is a common task in many applications. In general: The Noun Phrase Extractor consists of three modules: tokenization; part-of-speech tagging; noun phrase identification. These will be used as three main steps in building the new system ANPE, This paper aims at picking Arabic Noun Phrases from a corpus of documents, Relevant criteria (Recall and Precision), will be used as evaluation measure. On the one hand, when using NPs rather than using single terms, the system yields more relevant documents from the retrieved ones, on the other hand, it gave low precision because number of the retrieved documents will be decreased. At the researchers conclude and recommend improvements for more effective and efficient research in the future.

On Independent Adjectives: A Syntactic Analysis of Arabic Adjectival Nominals

International Journal of Linguistics, 2016

In this study, I aim to investigate the ambiguity on the category of the non-modifying Arabic adjectives that occur independently without a modified noun and to provide an account for the following questions: (1) are independent adjectives in Arabic nouns or adjectives?; (2) do they undergo a deadjectivizing process?; and (3) if they do, at which layer in adjectival phases does nominalization take place? I attempt to investigate the bi-categorial nature of independent adjectives in Arabic showing that they are internally adjectival but externally nominal. This analysis postulates that these adjectives have undergone category-change by moving A to the nominalizer D, which has the abstract affix NOM. Semantically, the adjective becomes referential (or +[indiv(iduated)]) naming entities of certain attributes, rather than denoting the attribute. However, DP is not the mere layer at which category-change takes place. The category-change is observed to occur earlier than the DP layers as indicated by the subregularities in the adjective form. The plural morpheme indicates three layers of nominality: the lower nP, NumP, and DP. Adjectives that undergo a-ton change are nominalized having singular nominal form. Adjectives that are nominalized in NumP are pluralized with the nominal broken plural, yet having a singular adjectival form. Finally, adjectives that are nominalized in the highest functional DP projection are marked with an adjectival sound plural morpheme. This analysis provides a neat account for the diversity in the adjective number form and is favored over the alternative assumption that adjectives in pro-drop languages drop the head noun.