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An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic

  • Osama Abdel-Ghafer EMAIL logo and Samer Jarbou
Published/Copyright: April 28, 2015
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Abstract

Expletives have been argued to be merged in Spec, TP, Spec, vP, or within DP. This paper argues that this line of thought does not apply to the existential expletive fii of Jordanian Arabic. The arguments presented in this paper rest on the assumption that merge of fii in any of those proposed merge sites cannot be empirically substantiated since it does not account for data from Jordanian Arabic. It is argued instead that, in an existential construction, fii heads its own projection, an expletive phrase, with the associate projected as complement of the expletive. Further, the expletive phrase is argued to merge in the specifier of a predicate phrase, whose head is a null adjectival predicate. Therefore, the view of fii as a syntactic dummy is reconsidered.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers of Folia Linguistica for many helpful comments that have improved the content of this paper.

Abbreviations

3 = third person; f = feminine; m = masculine; n = neutral; neg = negation; pl = plural; pst = past; sg = singular; unacc = unaccusative

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Received: 2013-5-4
Revised: 2012-11-18
Accepted: 2013-6-7
Accepted: 2014-10-3
Accepted: 2014-10-5
Published Online: 2015-4-28
Published in Print: 2015-5-1

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