Structural Case Assignment in Standard Arabic: A Feature-Based-Inheritance Perspective

Abdul-Hafeed Ali Fakih
2015 International Journal of English Linguistics  
The study seeks to explore structural (nominative and accusative) Case assignment in Standard Arabic (henceforth, SA). The objective is to offer a unified account of structural Case assignment in VSO structures, verbal copular sentences, and SVO structures introduced by the complementizer Ɂinna in SA. Following Chomsky's (2005) minimalist analysis, I argue that TP and VP are not phases in SA; I assume that CP and vP are the only phases in SA clause structure. Furthermore, I assume that the head
more » ... C of the CP phase is the source of all the features (edge feature and phi-features) on T in SA. The paper shows that Case is not assigned by T, but rather by the phase head C of CP which is responsible for Case assignment. It shows that Case and phi-features of the subject (the Goal) can be valued either under a long-distance Agree relation when the subject remains in situ in VSO structures or by raising the subject DP from [Spec-vP] to [Spec-TP] in SVO structures introduced by Ɂinna. Moreover, the accusative Case is assigned to the object under the Agree relation established between the phase head v and the object. Besides, I argue that there are two subjects in SVO structures introduced by Ɂinna: the external subject is the preverbal subject which follows Ɂinna and the internal subject which is a pro(nominal); in such structures I assume that C assigns two Cases; it assigns an external accusative Case to the preverbal NP and an internal nominative Case to the postverbal pro subject. 3 3. Moreover, cross-linguistic analysis of structural Case assignment and agreement phenomena indicated that the notion of government had to be reconsidered in order to account for Case assignment and subject-verb agreement in VSO languages, as has been seen in Sproat (1985) for Welsh and Mohammad (1990) for Standard Arabic. Further, similar analyses were proposed for VSO languages in Uriagereka (1989) and Raposa and Uriagereka (1990). This can be demonstrated in (4). 4. The syntactic representation in (4) shows that in languages with VSO word order, the head I(NFL) was assumed to be able to govern the subject DP in the specifier position of VP. In this regard, agreement features on the verb and Case assignment on the DP are accounted for neatly in the GB framework.
doi:10.5539/ijel.v5n5p1 fatcat:bzowuwqfrzg7bcnoyiwpvqnjya