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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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
- A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
- The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages
- Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological considerations
- An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic
- Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers
- Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach
- Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish
- Book Reviews
- David Fertig: Analogy and morphological change
- Adam Głaz. Lublin: Extended Vantage Theory in Linguistic Application: The Case of the English Articles
- Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsanen: English historical pragmatics
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
- A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
- The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages
- Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological considerations
- An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic
- Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers
- Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach
- Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish
- Book Reviews
- David Fertig: Analogy and morphological change
- Adam Głaz. Lublin: Extended Vantage Theory in Linguistic Application: The Case of the English Articles
- Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsanen: English historical pragmatics