Case Conflict in Arabic Relative Clauses: A Phase-Based Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v24i1.548Keywords:
agreement, Arabic, case conflict, Minimalism, relative clauseAbstract
Case conflict in relative clauses is observed when a relative pronoun carries Case different from the one associated with its base position. Instead, it appears with Case that is identical to Case of its antecedent that is external to the relative clause. This phenomenon - commonly referred to as Case Attraction - is attested in languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, and German. It is also easily observed in Modern Standard Arabic where the relative pronoun shows agreement in Case, gender and number with the noun modified by the relative clause. The original position of the relative pronoun is normally filled with a resumptive pronoun that represents the features of the relative pronoun. This study adopts the most recent assumptions of the Minimalist Program to account for the behavior of Arabic relative pronouns. It assumes that the relative clause is right adjoined to the noun it modifies and the relative pronoun moves to a left peripheral position within the structure of the relative clause leaving behind a copy. At a later stage of the derivation, Case of the relative pronoun is unified with Case of its antecedent. The unified Case feature is then valued under Agree with a higher head.
References
Alenazy, Mamdouh. (2009). Case, Agreement and Movement in Arabic: A Minimalist Approach. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag.
Aoun, Joseph and Yen-hui Audrey Li. (1993). The Syntax of Scope: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, 21. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Aoun, Joseph and Lina Choueiri. (1997). Resumption and last resort. Unpublished manuscript, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Aoun, Joseph, Lina Choueiri and Norbert Hornstein. (2001). ‘Resumption, movement, and derivational economy’. Linguistic Inquiry, 32: 371-403.
Baker, Mark. (2015). Case: Its Principles and Parameters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bhatt, Rajesh. (2002). ‘The raising analysis of relative clauses: Evidence from adjectival modification’. Natural Language Semantics, 10 (1). 43–90.
Bianchi, Valentina. (1999). Consequences of Antisymmetry; Headed Relative Clauses. Amsterdam: De Gruyter.
Bianchi, Valentina. (2000). ‘Some issues in the syntax of relative determiners’. In Artemis Alexiadou, Paul Law, André Meinunger, and Chris Wilder (eds.), The Syntax of Relative Clauses, 53-81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Borsley, Robert D. (1997). ‘Relative clauses and the theory of phrase structure’. Linguistic Inquiry, 28: 629-47.
Borsley, Robert D. (2001). More on the raising analysis of relative clauses. Unpublished manuscript, University of Essex.
Bošković, Željko. (2007). ‘On the locality and motivation of move and agree: An even more minimal theory’. Linguistic inquiry, 38: 589-644.
Chomsky, Noam. (1973). ‘Conditions on transformations’. In Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky (eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle, 232–286. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Chomsky, Noam. (1977). ‘On WH-movement’. In Peter W. Culicover, Thomas Wasow and Adrian Akmajian (eds), Formal syntax, 71–132. San Diego: Academic Press.
Chomsky, Noam. (1993). ‘A minimalist program for linguistic theory’. In Ken Hale and Keyser Jay Samuel (eds.), The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 1-52. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press
Chomsky, Noam. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. (1998). ‘Minimalist inquiries: The framework’. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 15.
Chomsky, Noam. (2001). ‘Derivation by phase’. In Kenneth L. Hale and Michael J. Kenstowicz, (eds.) Ken Hale. A Life in Language, 1-52. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. (2005). ‘Three factors in language design’. Linguistic Inquiry, 36 (1):1-22. DOI.org/10.1162/0024389052993655.
Chomsky, Noam. (2008). ‘On phases’. In Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Essays in Honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, 133-166. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, Ángel J. Gallego and Dennis Ott. (2019). ‘Generative grammar and the faculty of language: Insights, questions, and challenges’. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, Special Issue. 229-261.
DOI.org/10.5565/rev/catjl.288.
Choueiri, Lina. (2002). Issues in the syntax of resumption: Restrictive relatives in Lebanese Arabic. PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Czypionka, Anna, Laura Dörre and Josef Bayer. (2018). ‘Inverse case attraction: experimental evidence for a syntactically guided process’. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 21: 135-188.
DOI.org/10.1007/s10828-018-9099-3.
Fakih, Abdul-Hafeed Ali. (2017). ‘Φ-features, definiteness, and case in Standard Arabic adjectival agreement: A feature sharing approach’. International Journal of Arabic Linguistics, 3(2) 110-138.
Frampton, John and Sam Gutmann, (2006). ‘How sentences grow in the mind: Agreement and selection in an efficient minimalist syntax’. In Cedric Boeckx, (ed.), Agreement Systems, 121-157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Galal, Mohamed Mazen. (2004). A minimalist approach to relative clauses in Modern Standard Arabic. PhD Dissertation, University of Kansas.
Gallego, Ángel J. (2020). ‘Strong and weak “strict cyclicity” in phase theory’. In András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas and Sten Vikner (eds.), Syntactic Architecture and Its Consequences II: Between Syntax and Morphology, 207–226. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4280647.
Georgi, Doreen and Martin Salzmann. (2014). ‘Case attraction and matching in resumption in relatives: Evidence for top-down derivation’. In Anke Assmann, Sebastian Bank, Doreen Georgi, Timo Klein, and Eva Zimmermann (eds.), Topics at InfL, Vol. 92 of Linguistische Arbeits Berichte, 347-395. Universität Leipzig.
Georgi, Doreen and Martin Salzmann. (2017). ‘The matching effect in resumption: A local analysis based on case attraction and top-down derivation’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory: 35. 61-98. DOI.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9338-8.
Grimm, Scott. (2007). ‘Case attraction in ancient Greek’. Logic, Language, and Computation, 4363. 139-153.
Hiraiwa, Ken. (2001). ‘Multiple agree and the defective intervention constraint in Japanese’. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 40: 67-80.
Holmberg, Anders, Michelle Sheehan and van der Wal Jenneke. (2019). ‘Movement from the double object construction is not fully symmetrical’. Linguistic Inquiry, 50: 677-721.
DOI.org/10.1162/ling_a_00322.
Ibn Hisham, Jamaludeen. (1964). Mughni al-labeeb. Damascus: Darulfeker.
Jackendoff, Ray. (1977). X’-Syntax: A study of Phrase Structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Kayne, Richard S. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Kakarikos, Konstantinos. (2014). ‘Case attraction in free relative clauses of Ancient Greek: A study of the syntax–morphology interface’. In Nikolaos Lavidas, Thomaï Alexiou, and Areti Maria Sougari (eds.), Major Trends in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 1: 289-304. Versita Ltd, 78 York Street, London W1H 1DP, Great Britain: De Gruyter Open Poland.
Lees, Robert B. (1961). ‘The constituent structure of noun phrases’. American Speech, 36 (3): 159–168.
Marantz, Alec. (1991). Case and licensing. Paper presented at The Eighth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, University of Maryland.
Ouhalla, Jamal. (2004). ‘Semitic relatives’. Linguistic Inquiry, 35: 288-300.
Pankau, Andreas. (2016). ‘The matching analysis of relative clauses: Evidence form Upper Sorbian’. In Yohei Oseki, Masha Esipova and Stephanie Harves (eds), Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics). Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications.
Pesetsky, David. (1997). ‘Optimality theory and syntax: Movement and pronunciation’. In Diana Archangeli and Terry Langendoen (eds.) Optimality Theory; An Overview, 134-70. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pesetsky, David. (1998). ‘Some optimality principles of sentence pronunciation’. In Pilar Barbosa, Danny Fox, Paul Hagstrom, Martha, McGinnis and David Pesetsky (eds.), Is the Best Good Enough; Optimality and Competition in Syntax, 337-83. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pesetsky, David and Esther Torrego. (2007). ‘The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features’. In Simin Karimi, Vida Samiian and Wendy K. Wilkins (eds.), Phrasal and Clausal Architecture: Syntactic Derivation and Interpretation; in Honor of Joseph E. Edmond, 262-294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pittner, Κarin. (1995). ‘The case of German relatives’. The Linguistic Review, 12: 197-232.
Salzmann, Martin. (2006). Resumptive Prolepsis; A Study in Indirect A’-dependencies. Utrecht: LOT.
Salzmann, Martin. (2017). Reconstruction and Resumption in Indirect A’-dependencies. On the Syntax of Prolepsis and Relativization in (Swiss) German and beyond. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Vergnaud, Jean Roger. (1974). French relative clauses. PhD Dissertation, MIT.
