Camilleri, Maris: Revisiting Arabic predicative structures

This work brings together the array of predicative structures available across the different Arabic varieties and argues in favour of an analysis that keeps locative predications apart from other vanilla predications on the basis of a number of differing (morpho)syntactic behaviours. While locatives are initially presented as a unified set of structures, they are later differentiated as canonical vs. inverted and treated as two separate constructions. The former is attributed a be-loc analysis and the inverted counterpart is here argued to involve a GF - theta-role remapping that renders a be-loc analysis where the theme does not function as a SUBJ, but as an unaccusative OBJ; an analysis that is a first of its type in the literature on Arabic and one that challenges the mainstream analysis of this structure, as well as what NOM case identifies in the grammar of the Modern Standard Arabic variety. The analysis for inverted locatives being pursued here in turn predicts and diachronically motivates the otherwise synchronically ad hoc constraints that characterise (predicative) BE possessive structures, which are here understood to be direct descendants of inverted locative structures.

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April 25, 2022