Grammaticalisation of Raħ in Dialectal Arabic: Generative Phases
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1206.13Keywords:
grammaticalisation, discourse particles, φ-features, agreement, movementAbstract
The lexical item raħ has undergone two phases of grammaticalisation, from a lexical item used as a lexical verb to a temporal-functional particle T-raħ, and further to a discourse-functional particle D-raħ. Syntactic diagnostics show that both T-raħ and D-raħ have developed properties of head status, adopting conventional Minimalist and Cartographic principles (Chomsky, 2000; Rizzi, 1997; Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl, 2007), where evidence is deduced from the fact that movement of a head is sensitive to intervention effects in the course of the derivation (Rizzi, 2006). The novelty about raħ is that, in its first phase of grammaticalised T-raħ, while it has lost its φ-features input, in the sense that it doesn’t spell out any agreeing suffix with the DP it marks, in its second phase of grammaticalised D-raħ, it has retained its φ-features, hence, an agreeing head. Further, this agreeing characteristic of D-raħ, with investigations of more articulated data, brings insight to the current research on discourse particles in that it goes against the widely-adopted characterization of discourse particles that postulates a non-agreeing property of discourse particles; discourse particles do not inflect for agreement. The syntactic properties shown by the grammaticalised raħ propose, on empirical groundings by movement considerations, that discourse particles externally merge in the course of the derivation, giving credence to the theory that the syntax of discourse particles has changed from Move to Merge (Hack, 2014).
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