Word Order, Agreement, and Pronominalization in Standard and Palestinian Arabic (review)

This book is a revised version of Mohammad’s doctoral dissertation, The sentential structure of Arabic (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1989). It deals primarily with word order variation and subject-verb agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the author’s native dialect, Palestinian Arabic (PA), within the minimalist framework, following Noam Chomsky’s The minimalist program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The reader should be aware that the work is technical and difficult to follow in many places without at least a rudimentary knowledge of MSA and/or a colloquial Arabic dialect, preferably PA or one close to it.

Ch. 1, ‘Variation in word order’ (1–47), packed with 155 interesting sentences which illustrate the various points raised, is the most interesting for general linguists. It discusses fundamental concepts in traditional Arabic grammar using, among other medieval Arab grammarians, easily the best known of them—Sibawayhi (8th century a.d.); e.g. the basic distinction between a jumla fiʕliyya (correct from fiʕliya, 1) ‘verbal sentence’ and a jumla ?ismiyya ‘nominal sentence’, the notion of mubtada? ‘subject of an equational (= M’s ‘equative’) sentence, etc. (1–2). M emphasizes the principle that, if the MSA case-marking does not distinguish subject (S) from object (O), ‘word order freedom is constrained’ (3). However, in colloquial Arabic dialects, case has been lost, and M demonstrates that PA, as one might have expected, does not enjoy the word order freedom of MSA. It has VSO, VOS, and SVO with two-argument verbs whereas MSA allows all six possibilities.

One neglected topic within Arabic linguistics is the syntax-pragmatics interface. Thus, it was rewarding to find a brief mention of pragmatics as it relates to sentence interpretation.Masserts, e.g. that ?akalat 1-kummaθraa muna ‘Mona ate the pear’ is, theoretically speaking, syntactically ambiguous since the verb can agree with both NPs; however, the pragmatic considerations rule out a pear’s eating Mona (7). Needless to say, the circumstances change if one is talking of the world of dreams or science fiction, where Mona could be eaten by a pear.

Ch. 2, ‘The categorial status of VP in Arabic’ (49–80), asserts that Arabic, a VSO language, requires VP as a necessary grammatical category, and that ‘as in English, the overwhelming majority of idiomatic expressions do indeed involve the subject as a “variable,” in the sense that the choice of the subject does not affect the interpretation of the object in terms of its thematic role, while the choice of the object does affect the thematic role of the subject’ (74).

Ch. 3, ‘Word order and the expletive pronoun’ (81–108), expands on some ideas first presented by Abdelkader Fassi Fehri (Issues in the structure of Arabic classes and words,Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). Thus, the occurrence of the expletive pronoun huwa ‘he, it’ in a sentence such as *huwa mustaħiilun ?an nattafiqa yawman ‘It is impossible for us to agree some day’ (sic) is ‘awkward’ (91). This sentence is much more natural without huwa. The main conclusion offered is that NP-raising does not occur (108).

Ch. 4, ‘The expletive hypothesis’ (109–45), states that an ‘expletive subject . . . “dictates” or “mediates” the agreement features on the verb in VS orders’ (115). M considers herein objections voiced against the hypothesis over the years by a number of scholars and finally provides a revised version of it, viz., the expletive pronoun in MSA is third person singular whereas in PA it is merely third person (145).

Ch. 5, ‘Asymmetries in binding’ (147–80), discusses sentences involving pronominal coreference rejecting the traditional analysis of the medieval Arab grammarians and Fassi Fehri (1993) (153–65). It was fascinating to learn that PA works differently from MSAin that the former allows ‘clitic-doubling’: mazza ʕu m?alfu lalektaab ‘Its author tore the book’, in which the particle la is literally the preposition ‘to’ (175).

With this book...