Full metadata
Title
The pronominal system in standard Arabic: strong, clitic and affixal pronouns
Description
This thesis investigates the pronominal system in Standard Arabic. It seeks to unravel the correlation between independent and dependent personal pronouns. Although both pronoun groups are treated as distinct parts of the lexicon, I argue that dependent pronouns are reduced forms derived from the strong counterparts. This study examines how these forms (reduced and non-reduced) relate to one another phonologically and syntactically. Various analytical tools are utilized including vowel harmony, syllable structure as well as some principles of Distributed Morphology and Chomsky's 1995 Minimalist Program. With regard to the phonological relations, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are generated from their parallel strong forms by omitting the initial syllable. Dependent object pronouns are formed by omitting the first two syllables. The first person singular and third person plural masculine subject pronouns are suppletive forms completing the paradigm. They are not derived by reduction from their full counterparts. After investigating the distributional properties of both sets of pronouns, I propose a bipartite subcategorization of reduced pronominals into two subclasses: clitics and affixes. Clitics surface in positions in which strong pronouns cannot occur. As for affixes, they are used to mark verb-argument agreement. In light of these positions, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are always affixes while dependent object pronouns are always clitics. Clitics function as syntactically independent units which combine with hosts at the phonological phase as a result of their prosodic deficiency while affixes associate with hosts when features are valued during a sentence derivation.
Date Created
2013
Contributors
- Albuhayri, Salem (Author)
- Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor)
- Adams, Karen (Committee member)
- Major, Roy (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
viii, 88 p. : ill
Language
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.17805
Statement of Responsibility
by Salem Albuhayri
Description Source
Retrieved on Nov. 7, 2013
Level of coding
full
Note
Partial requirement for: M.A., Arizona State University, 2013
Note type
thesis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88)
Note type
bibliography
Field of study: English
System Created
- 2013-07-12 06:18:05
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:42:24
- 2 years 7 months ago
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