Chapter published in:
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXII: Papers selected from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Tempe, Arizona, 2018
Edited by Elly van Gelderen
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 9] 2020
► pp. 71–108

On the syntax of correlation: Evidence from Egyptian Arabic

| Middlebury College
The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze the syntax of two types of correlation structures (CSs) in Egyptian Arabic (EA): A structure introduced by the quantifier kull (‘every’), and another introduced by the measure PP ʕalā Ɂadd (literally, ‘on/by amount’). More specifically, it is shown that both types of structures involve subordination, where the first clause is subordinate to the second. A syntactic analysis along the lines of den Dikken (2005) and Taylor (2013) for comparative correlatives is first shown to account for the main grammatical properties of both types of CSs in EA. A cartographic implementation of the analysis is then proposed to account for a wider range of empirical data related to CSs, including their information structure properties. The data and analysis presented in this paper thus add to the body of empirical literature on CSs cross-linguistically, while showing that their grammatical properties do follow under standard syntactic analysis, and that analyzing such structures as ‘constructional’ primitives of the grammar is unnecessary.
Keywords: correlation structures, comparative correlatives, left-periphery, clausal cartography, Arabic syntax, Egyptian Arabic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The grammatical properties of correlation structures in EA
    • 2.1Type A of correlation structures in EA
    • 2.2Type B of correlation structures in EA
  • 3.The macro-syntax of correlation structures
  • 4.The micro-syntax of correlation structures
    • 4.1Deriving correlation structures in EA
    • 4.2Lexical doubling in CSs as a post-syntactic operation
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.A cartographic analysis of the micro-syntax of correlation structures
  • 6.Brief remarks on ‘constructions’
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.9.04sol
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