A note on phrasal movement in Modern South Arabian and its consequences

Abstract

I argue that the predominance of clause-final negation and the ban on object cliticization on perfective verb stems with a subject agreement suffix in the Modern South Arabian languages (MSA) Mehri and Jibbali are both consequences of the fact that in these languages, a verbal projection rather than a verbal head is probed by T(ense) or by a higher functional head. As a result, this verbal projection moves to a position above T and a fortiori above negation. A corollary of verb-projection phrasal movement above T is that the affixal phi features of subject agreement are stranded, bereft of a suitable host. In face of this conundrum, MSA reanalyzes subject agreement as a weak pronoun that undergoes suffixation under adjacency to a verbal host, like a pronominal object suffix. This reanalysis has a price, however, in that only a single suffix is possible on a single host, since only one suffix is adjacent to it. Hence, object pronouns cannot occur as clitics on a verb with a weak pronominal subject suffix.