Previous Issues
Volume :24 Issue : 94 2006
Add To Cart
Download
Syntactic Analysis of Marked Equative Sentences in Arabic: Minimality Program
Auther : Nuha AlShurafa
The data investigated are drawn from three varieties of Arabic: Standard, Hijazi and Palestinian. The main aim of this paper is to analyze the marked usages of Equative sentences, henceforth ESs, in the three specified varieties of Arabic, within the framework of Minimality Program (MP), and where verbal devices of sentence focus are applied, in order to describe their internal syntactic mechanism. The three Arabic varieties display syntactic similarities in most of the marked ESs. However, more richnes is displayed in the informal dialectal varieties than the formal standard variety of Arabic. As a result of the analysis, three formal statements ae formulated in this paper, which describe and relate the marked (or focused) ESs to the unmarked ones. The first ststement (in 15 below) shows the verbal devices that related the marked to the unmarked ESs. The second formal statement (in 17 a&b below) accounts for the grammatical ESs in focus using these verbal devices. And, the third statement in (in 21 below) excludes the ungrammatical (iff-formed) ESs usges and accounts only for the grammatical. Discussion is based on related previous studies in syntax.