Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic LinguisticsEdited by Ellen Broselow and Hamid Ouali
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 317] 2011
► pp. 75–126
Various grammatical phenomena have been analyzed so far as essentially formal, or interfacing with PF syntax. Verb subject agreement asymmetries, subject pronoun deficiency (or ‘Pro drop‘), and morpho-syntactic variation in reciprocal expressions in Arabic have been treated as such. The article investigates how important properties of these phenomena can be more successfully treated in a fine-grained semantic syntax. The analysis is based on the semantic interpretability of features (typically Number), found in Agree configurations, in line with Minimalist approaches.