A Nanosyntactic Analysis of Arabic Complementizers

Abstract

This study investigates the syntactic composition of complementizers in Arabic from a nanosyntactic perspective (Starke, 2009). The study unravels the dichotomy in the behavior of root complementizers in Arabic; it highlights how the selection of complementizers is impacted by presupposed information and the degree of certainty. In spoken varieties of Arabic, such as Jordanian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, root complementizers are blocked from root positions, but such positions are accessible for Modern Standard Arabic. Refining Ross' (1970) hidden verbs theorem and Fassi Fehri’s (2012) featural distinction, the study shows that if a complementizer is selected by different triggers of veridicality, such as ʔanna in MSA, ʔɨnn in Jordanian Arabic and ʔɘnno in Lebanese Arabic, the complementizer cannot appear without its trigger, whereas if a complementizer is selected by one trigger, such as ʔɪnna in MSA, the complementizer can be used in root positions without a trigger. Comparing the findings of the study with Baunz' (2018) universal hierarchy, we show that the hierarchy in its current status fails to account for Arabic data. The conclusion gives a stronger contribution for the semantic composition of complementizers.