The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
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Marwan Jarrah
und
Abdulazeez Jaradat
Abstract
This article investigates the morphosyntactic behavior of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in three Arabic dialects (Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic). It argues that this morpheme is categorially a head that projects Size Phrase (cf. De Belder, Marijke. 2008. Size matters: Towards a syntactic decomposition of countability. In Natasha Abner & Jason Bishop (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 116–122. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project). In so doing, this analysis obviously challenges (Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing feminine to mean: Gender, number, numeral, and quantifier extensions in Arabic. Lanham: Lexington Books) recent proposal that (non-)concatenative diminutives in Arabic are modifiers that are adjoined to categorized words when they indicate smallness in size. Additionally, this article provides an account of the observation that the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only appear with the feminine ending and a certain group of nouns, including collective aggregates (e.g., fruits and vegetables) and granular aggregates (e.g., grains, nuts, and seeds). We show that words suffixed with the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only give rise to an individuation reading (not a partition or non-count reading). This is syntactically interpreted as indicating that Size Phrase (headed by -aaj) is always dominated in Arabic grammar by Division Phrase (cf. Borer, Hagit. 2005. In name only. Oxford: Oxford University Press), whose presence derives an individuation reading.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2022
- Research Articles
- Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
- How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
- Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
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- The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
- Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
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- Corrigendum
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2022
- Research Articles
- Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
- How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
- Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
- Phonetic change over the career: a case study
- Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
- The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
- Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
- Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
- Modeling (im)precision in context
- The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
- Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
- Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
- A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
- Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
- Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
- A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
- Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
- L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
- Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
- Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
- The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
- Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
- Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
- Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
- How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
- The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
- A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
- Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
- Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
- Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
