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Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVIII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, 2014
Edited by Youssef A. Haddad and Eric Potsdam
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 4] 2016
► pp. 129–152

Temporal NPIs and NCIs as adverb phrases

The case of Jordanian Arabic

I analyze the status of the temporal NPI ʕʊmr and NCI baʕd in Jordanian Arabic and explain their distribution and syntactic licensing. Despite their head-like properties (hosting clitics and assigning case), I argue that both elements are AdvPs in Spec-XP positions rather than heads projecting their own clausal structure. These items can be pre-verbal or post-verbal; they differ in their ability to precede negative constituents; they require a complement (DP or CP) that can be co-referential with the subject or object of the clause (or, in the NPI case, the pronominal complement inside a syntactic island). I contend that the similarities and differences among these properties follow from the fact that ʕʊmr may be base-generated either pre-verbally or post-verbally, while baʕd is always base-generated post-verbally and optionally moves to a pre-verbal position. I conclude that both c-command and specifier-head configurations can license such items, while the head-complement configuration cannot.
Keywords: adverb phrases, Jordanian Arabic, licensing configurations, negative concord, negative polarity
Published online: 25 May 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.4.06alq
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