NPI licensing in Jordanian Arabic: An argument for downward entailment and syntax-semantics interface (original) (raw)
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The Licensing of Negative Sensitive Items in Jordanian Arabic
This study investigates the licensing conditions on Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). JA exhibits both types of NSIs that are discussed in the literature: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and Negative Concord Items (NCIs). Although these two sets of items seem to form a natural class in the sense that they show certain sensitivity to negation, they display important distributional differences that call for different analyses. First, NCIs can sometimes express negation on their own as in fragment answers; whereas NPIs cannot do so. Second, the licensing of NCIs is clause-bound; whereas the licensing of NPIs is not. Third, NPIs are acceptable in a number of contexts that do not involve overt negation; whereas NCIs are acceptable in only a subset of these contexts, namely without-clauses and before-clauses. The licensing of NPIs and NCIs in JA is discussed in light of previous theories that are mainly based on the distribution of these items in English and European languages. The investigation of NPI licensing in JA shows that the distribution of these items can best be captured by the semantic notion of (Non-)veridicality (Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2011). Data from JA show that NPIs in the language need to be in the c-command domain of a non-veridical function at LF as proposed by the (Non)-veridicality Approach. The investigation of NCI licensing in JA shows that none of the NCI licensing theories previously proposed in the literature extends to JA. Alternatively, an account is proposed that is basically a crucial modification of the Non-negative Indefinites Approach (Zeijlstra 2004, 2008; Penka 2007, 2011) which takes Negative Concord to be a manifestation of syntactic agreement between an NCI and a semantic negation in the clause, where syntactic agreement is defined in terms of feature checking following recent assumptions within Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001). I argue that NCIs are non-negative indefinites that are endowed with an [uNEG]-feature that needs to be checked against an [iNEG]-feature of a semantic negation that can be either overt or abstract in the clause. I also propose that Spec-head agreement and Head complement agreement exist side by side with c-command as licensing configurations for NCIs. I further argue that the level of representation at which NCI licensing takes place is not the same among all NCIs: while some NCIs are licensed at LF, other NCIs are licensed in the surface syntax. I show that this alternative account can capture the distribution of NCIs in JA. I also show that this account extends to NCIs in other languages such as Moroccan Arabic, Polish, and Spanish and is thus supported cross-linguistically.
The Morphosyntax of Negative Pronouns Constructions in Jordanian Arabic
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2017
The main aim of this paper is to investigate the asymmetric distribution of negation strategies in verbless constructions in Jordanian Arabic and similar dialects. In particular, negative pronouns constructions present two major problems for analyses of sentential negation. The first problem lies in the use of the verbal negation strategy in such constructions although they are verbless. The second problem is the merger of subject pronouns that are clear maximal projections with the negative marker occupying the head of the negative projection. To solve these problems, the paper provides an analysis that is based on the morphosyntactic properties of negative pronouns as well as the discourse properties of the constructions in which they occur. To account for the merger between the pronoun and the head of the negative, the study demonstrates that such pronouns belong to the class of weak bound subject pronouns that undergo head movement to Neg to check and delete its uninterpretable [+D] feature. The proposed analysis treats negative pronouns constructions as topic-comment structures that involve a fronted DP followed by a complete string of predication. As such, the paper concludes that the use of the marked negation strategy is a natural outcome given the discourse properties associated with topic-comment constructions to which negative pronouns constructions belong.
ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1999
This paper is concerned with the syntax of negative sentences and negative polarity items (NPIs) in English and Japanese and argues for the validity of a feature-checking analysis in the framework of Chomsky (1995). It is demonstrated that the feature-checking analysis based on feature specification on Neg and NPIs can present a unified view of negative sentences and that different distributions of NPIs naturally follow from it. At the same time, it is argued that negative sentences suggest a locality condition supplementary to the Minimal Link Condition in Chomsky (1995), in support of Manzini (1998). This locality condition is incorporated into the analysis as the NEG-Convention.
A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation, i.e., every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the form of negative elements, but the position of negative elements is also subject to cross-linguistic variation. Moreover, languages also differ in terms of the number of manifestations of negative morphemes: in some languages negation is realized by a single word or morpheme, in other languages by multiple morphemes. The syntax of negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of (negative) polarity. In short, and leaving the formal discussion for later, negative polarity items (NPIs) are items whose distribution is limited to a number of contexts, which in some sense all count as negative. NPIs surface in various kinds of environments and may also vary in terms of the restrictions they impose on their licensing contexts and the type of licensing relation. Therefore, studying NPIs provides more insight not only into the nature of such context-sensitive elements, but also into the syntax of negation itself. Finally, it should be mentioned that the distinction between negative elements and NPIs is not always that clear-cut. In many languages negative indefinites, quite often referred to as n-words (after Laka 1990) appear to be semantically negative in certain constructions, while exhibiting NPIlike behavior in other configurations. The same may also apply to negative markers in some languages. This chapter aims at providing an overview of the most important recent findings and insights gained in the study of the syntax of negation and polarity.
Negatives Scoping Over Verbal Clauses in Some Arabic Varieties
Us-China Foreign Language, 2019
Both Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) use the six negative particles: laa, maa, laysa, lam, lamma, and lan. Other Arabic varieties have only two negative particles. For instance, Hijazi Arabic (HA) uses laa and maa. This shows that the three varieties (CA, MSA, and HA) have the same underlying negatives, namely, laa and maa, but CA and MSA have a number of inflected forms of laa that HA does not have. The paper shows how HA uses the two negatives when scoping over verbal clauses while the other two varieties, i.e., CA and MSA, use all the six negatives. It is worthy of note here that HA is descendant from CA which has the six negatives. This suggests that HA must have lost the inflected variants of laa..
The Negation System in Arabic and English language
A contrastive analysis is adopted in this study to investigate the negation system of English and Arabic language . The study also aims to shed light on the points of similarities and differences in negation in both languages. The scope of the study is to investigate the syntactic and semantic behavior of negative particles in English and Arabic language. In order to support this aim, Data are taken from some grammar books and from other linguistics studies. Therefore, It is worth mentioning that these examples are not contextualized. The findings reveal that the two languages share some aspects in negation system and at the same time they differ in others.
On the Syntax of Sentential Negation in Yemeni Arabic
International Journal of English Linguistics
In this paper we explore the system of negation in modern Arabic dialects with a particular focus on Yemeni Arabic (Raymi dialect). The data observed in this dialect incorporate important and novel facts related to the syntax of sentential negation in Arabic. This includes the distribution of negation patterns and the interaction between negation and negative polarity items, which challenges the two widely adopted analyses for sentential negation in Arabic: The Spec-NegP analysis and the discontinuous Neg analysis. In this paper we argue that neither analysis can provide an adequate account of Raymi Arabic facts. Instead, a more recent analysis, the Spilt-Neg analysis, can accommodate them. In addition, in the study we provide empirical evidence in support of the Higher-Neg analysis, wherein Neg is projected higher than T in the derivation.
On Negation and Focus in Standard Arabic: Interface-based Approach
This paper addresses the interface between syntax and information structure by interpreting focus under negation. To this end, data will be examined from the Arabic negative marker laysa, which exhibits interesting focus features that broaden our knowledge of syntactic and semantic aspects of negation and deepen our understanding of what information structural effects play a role at the interface. Focus typology can be expressed by laysa in its two major types, namely the information focus and contrastive focus, resulting in three different ways in which negation and focus can interact at the Syntax-Information Structure Interface. These ways I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Qassim University for supporting this work. I am very grateful to Anders Holmberg and Abdelkader Fassi Fehri for many interesting discussions we have had about syntax in general and Minimalism in particular. Special thanks are forwarded to Ahmed Alkuraydis for helping me with the bibliographies. I am solely responsible for any mistakes or inadequacy.
Aspects of the Clause Structure and Word Formation in Arabic
Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies, 2018
The present dissertation is a defense of the hypothesis that word formation is syntactic. As its title indicates, two lines of investigations are pursued. The first one has to do with clause structure, in which we examine the role of functional heads in determining grammatical processes in both Standard Arabic (SA) and Moroccan Arabic (MA). The functional heads investigated are: VoiceP, vP and NegP. As far as VoiceP and vP are concerned, we explore their role in introducing arguments into verbal argument structures. The effects of the split VP structure proposed are further adumbrated with data from double object constructions, location verbs, causatives, anticausatives and passives. As for NegP, we show how it interacts with TP and CP to derive Subject-Neg agreement and the temporal interpretation associated with lam and lan in SA. We take these two properties to be explained using Chomsky’s (2005) Feature Inheritance mechanism. The other formal line of investigation concerns word formation, in which we investigate the mechanisms whereby morphologically simplex and complex words are formed. The claim we defend here is that the structure below the word level and the structure above the word level are derived using the same formal syntactic rules. For example, negation in MA supports the assumption that word structure and syntactic structure share the same general formal properties. In this regard, we provide an analysis of the distribution of the discontinuous negative morpheme and the co-occurrence restriction that holds between {-ʃ} and Negative Polarity Items. For the former, it is shown that the distribution of negation supports the existence of syntactic phenomenon at the word level, namely the existence of phase-by-phase Spell-Out. For the latter, a general context-sensitive constraint is developed to capture this generalization, which is shown to be an instance of Syntactic Haplology.