Unraveling Negation: A Morphosyntactic Study of Hail Arabic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1501.33Keywords:
Hail Arabic, verbal predicate, prohibitive laa, sentential negation, negation particlesAbstract
This paper investigates the morphosyntax of sentential negation in Hail Arabic, a previously unexplored topic. It demonstrates the use of three negators (maa, laa, and maa-pronoun) and their sensitivity to predicate type. It shows that maa and laa are used in verbal sentences, whereas the inflected negation marker maa-pronoun only occurs in verbless sentences. The study argues for a Low-Neg analysis, positioning NegP below the tense node, and utilizes the Minimalist Program to explain the observed patterns. The findings reveal that adjacency is required for verbal negation but not for verbless negation and that the inflected negator maa-pronoun agrees in number, gender, and person with the subject. Additionally, the paper utilizes the Split CP Hypothesis to explore the occurrence of maa in both SVO and VSO constructions and the contrastive focus reading associated with the Neg-TP pattern. It proposes, based on the syntactic and semantic properties of the clause-initial negation particles, that the negator dominating the subject (i.e., TP) is a focus negation particle heading the Focus Phrase in the CP area. It concludes that the position of NegP in the clausal hierarchy is not only syntactically conditioned but also semantically/pragmatically driven.
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