Sentential negation in English and Arabic: A minimalist approach

Abstract

This dissertation presents an analysis for sentential negation in English and Arabic within the framework of the Minimalist Program as outlined in Chomsky (1993, 1995). To provide a comprehensive analysis for sentential negation in Arabic, six Arabic dialects are studied, namely, Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Saudi Arabic. The analysis is also expected to be applied crosslinguistically.

The analysis I provide is based on the analyses suggested by Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1991) for English and French. I show that the movement of the verb and subject in Arabic (as proposed for English and French) is triggered by the strength of the nominal ([+D]) and verbal ([+V]) features that the heads of AgrSP and TP carry. I also show that Agr S plays a role in the word order in Standard Arabic but not in the non-Standard Arabic dialects. Evidence presented in this study shows the verb moves overtly to T in all Arabic dialects.

To account for the optionality of the subject's movement in the non-Standard Arabic dialects, I suggest a third value of strength of the nominal features of T, [-strong, -weak], which means that the nominal features are not strong enough to force the movement of the subject before Spell-out or weak enough to prevent it. To account for the merger between the verb and the negative marker, I argue, along with Benmamoun (2000), that Neg is specified for a [+D] feature and the merger is to check this feature.

With respect to copular sentences in English, I argue that they are best described as small clauses that are dominated by an AgrP. The place I suggest for the copula is the head of vp, which is a functional projection that dominates AgrP. I show that copular and verbless sentences in Arabic can be accounted for in a principled way if we follow the proposed structure for the English copular sentences. One difference between the two languages is that in Arabic the head of AgrP dominating the small clause can be occupied by an agreement pronoun (AGR), which may surface optionally or obligatorily.