Research in Afroasiatic Grammar (review)

This is a collection of papers from the Third Conference on Afroasiatic Languages (Sophia Antipolis, France, 1996). Though the papers are sequenced alphabetically by author, in discussing their content, I group them here thematically.

Four papers discuss subject placement in Semitic. In ‘On the status of AgrS in some null subject languages’, Ahmed Akkal and Abdel-kader Gonegai propose that preverbal subjects in Standard Arabic (SA) are topics, thematically connected to a resumptive pronoun, namely verbal agreement. Elabbas Benmamoun accounts for the lack of number agreement in VS order in SA in ‘Agreement asymmetries and the PF interface’. He proposes that after the verb and subject undergo PF merger, the number feature is spelled out only once (by the DP). In ‘Word order in Hebrew’, Edit Doron tackles the question of whether VS order in Hebrew is the result of a VSO syntax, with the verb in IP, or a V2 syntax. After noting that topicalization in an embedded clause blocks extraction from that clause, she convincingly argues that Modern Hebrew has only the V2 strategy. Ur Shlonsky argues for a split-CP analysis of the left periphery in SA. In ‘Remarks on the complementizer layer of Standard Arabic’, he distinguishes topicalization from focalization (through criteria of case, resumption, and specificity) and discusses the syntax of ForceP, ultimately arriving at an articulated cartography for A’ movement.

Four papers focus on NP/DP structure. Miriam Engelhardt discusses argument-taking nominals in Hebrew in ‘Bare NPs’. She argues that activity-nominals lack a determiner, leading to their inability to host subjects, agreement, or definiteness. In ‘Wolof genitive constructions and the construct state’, Alain Kihm shows that Wolof possessives are head-initial and spread definiteness, suggesting affinities with the Semitic construct state and hence, parallel analyses. In ‘Possession in sentences and noun phrases’, Jamal Ouhalla argues that in Moroccan Arabic possessive NPs, the possessor binds a variable in the possessee, while in possessive sentences, predication takes place, suggesting a wholly different syntax for the two constructions. In the especially clear and intriguing ‘Nonnominal constructs’, Tal Siloni discusses adjectival and gerundive construct-states in Hebrew, arguing that the construct phenomenon is cross-categorial and depends not on [−definite], but on [−tense].

Six papers are on morphology and phonology. In ‘Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission’, Morris Halle illustrates two postsyntactic operations in Semitic: impoverishment, which deletes features from a terminal node, and fission, which creates a secondary position of exponence for the unrealized features of a single terminal. In ‘Distributing features and affixes in Arabic subject verb agreement paradigms’, Abdelkader Fassi Fehri argues against Halle’s analysis, proposing that the prefixal nature of person morphemes and suffixal nature of number/gender morphemes in the imperfect conjugation calls for a syntactic analysis in which person is an incorporated pronoun in MoodP. Ali Idrissi argues in ‘On Berber plurals’ that some Berber plurals (in particular, A-plurals, which involve internal modification) are not derived from the corresponding singulars; rather, both are derived from a common nominal base. Jean Lowenstamm, in ‘The no straddling effect and its interpretation: A formal property of Chaha 2nd feminine singular formation’, discusses the exponent of feminine in the imperative, a classic Gurage floating feature that either triggers palatalization or surfaces as /i/. Lowenstamm’s proposal is that it’s a suffix without templatic support, and its mobility is due to a constraint that a governing relation cannot straddle a stem-affix boundary. Gábor Takács performs thorough lexical comparison in ‘Recent problems of Egyptian historical phonology at the present stage of comparative-historical Afroasiatic linguistics’ to illustrate the reconstruction process for, for example, the identity of Egyptian aleph. Philippe Ségéral discusses directional vectors of vocalic change to mark aspectual-temporal oppositions, focusing on Akkadian, in...