This thesis presents an analysis of participles in MA which show verbal and nominal features but are not nouns or verbs. Participles pattern with verbs, combine with adverbs and take objects. Like nouns, they partially agree with their subjects, are negated with mu or inflected ma and cannot appear in VSO order nor do they allow subject-drop. I propose that without the functional projection vP, bare VPs are not fully verbal. When participles occur in a finite present-tense sentence, they act like non-verbal predicates and the resulting copula construction conforms to Benmamoun’s (2008) framework of verbless sentences in Arabic. The existence of VP explains the verbal properties, and the absence of vP explains the nominal ones. The lack of vP explains lacking full agreement and using non-verbal negative particles with participles. Viewing participles as bare VPs is consistent with Croft’s (1991) de-verbalizing hierarchy where verb types range from being fully finite to completely nominalized forms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/30208 |
| Date | 13 January 2015 |
| Creators | Makkawi, Amani |
| Contributors | Ghomeshi, Jila (Linguistics), Oxford, Will (Linguistics) Benmamoun, Abbas (University of Illinois) |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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