The Syntax of Wh-Interrogatives in Hijazi Arabic: A Non-Transformational Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1310.11Keywords:
unbounded dependencies, wh-interrogatives, HPSG, Hijazi ArabicAbstract
Unbounded dependencies are structures where two elements that typically co-occur appear far from one another in spite of the syntactic dependency between them. Wh-interrogatives are one of the mostly investigated types of unbounded dependencies cross-linguistically. To contribute to the ongoing linguistic research in wh-interrogatives, the current paper attempts to explore them in one of the Arabic varieties: Hijazi Arabic (HA). The paper primarily focuses on how to account for the constructions of HA wh-interrogatives using one of the prominent non-transformational theories in generative syntax: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The analysis proposed herein also sheds light on the word order used in HA. The paper concludes that there are two constraints to which wh-interrogatives in HA are subject.
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