Prosodic constituency and locality in Levantine Arabic
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Frederick M. Hoyt
Abstract
This paper examines negative concord sentences in Southern Levantine Arabic (Palestinian and Jordanian), providing evidence that locality restrictions on negative concord licensing are in fact restrictions on prosodic rather than syntactic locality. While negative concord is generally a clause-local dependency, a set of exceptions is examined in which the licensing relationship crosses subordinate clause boundaries. These examples involve a set of subordinating verbs with a high frequency in the Maamouri, Buckwalter, Graff, & Jin (2006a,b) corpus. Acoustic analysis of these data shows a strong correlation between the frequency of a subordinating verb in the corpus, its acceptability with non-local negative concord and reduced prosodic prominence in its pronunciation. This suggests that non-local negative concord licensing correlates with a subordinating verb structure being pronounced as a single prosodic constituent.
Abstract
This paper examines negative concord sentences in Southern Levantine Arabic (Palestinian and Jordanian), providing evidence that locality restrictions on negative concord licensing are in fact restrictions on prosodic rather than syntactic locality. While negative concord is generally a clause-local dependency, a set of exceptions is examined in which the licensing relationship crosses subordinate clause boundaries. These examples involve a set of subordinating verbs with a high frequency in the Maamouri, Buckwalter, Graff, & Jin (2006a,b) corpus. Acoustic analysis of these data shows a strong correlation between the frequency of a subordinating verb in the corpus, its acceptability with non-local negative concord and reduced prosodic prominence in its pronunciation. This suggests that non-local negative concord licensing correlates with a subordinating verb structure being pronounced as a single prosodic constituent.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The development of future participles and future tense markers from motion predicates 9
- Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Amman 29
-
Syntax
- Prosodic constituency and locality in Levantine Arabic 47
- Negation and the subject position in San’ani Arabic 75
- Splitting Neg: 91
- Multiple agreement in Arabic 121
- Cyclic AGREE derives restrictions on cliticization in classical Arabic 135
-
Phonology
- Secondary stress exist in Cairene Arabic? 163
- Paradoxical paradigms! Evidence from Lebanese Arabic phonology 185
-
Sociolinguistics
- The Arabic of Bukhara 213
-
Semantic/Pragmatics
- Terms of endearment and anger in Levantine Arabic 243
-
Language acquisition
- On the L1 development of final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic 263
-
Neurolinguistics
- Neurocognitive modeling of the two language varieties in Arabic Diglossia 285
- Index 303
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The development of future participles and future tense markers from motion predicates 9
- Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Amman 29
-
Syntax
- Prosodic constituency and locality in Levantine Arabic 47
- Negation and the subject position in San’ani Arabic 75
- Splitting Neg: 91
- Multiple agreement in Arabic 121
- Cyclic AGREE derives restrictions on cliticization in classical Arabic 135
-
Phonology
- Secondary stress exist in Cairene Arabic? 163
- Paradoxical paradigms! Evidence from Lebanese Arabic phonology 185
-
Sociolinguistics
- The Arabic of Bukhara 213
-
Semantic/Pragmatics
- Terms of endearment and anger in Levantine Arabic 243
-
Language acquisition
- On the L1 development of final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic 263
-
Neurolinguistics
- Neurocognitive modeling of the two language varieties in Arabic Diglossia 285
- Index 303
