Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Arabic

Mahmoud S Al Mahmoud

doi:10.1177/2158244014537650

Abstract

This article discusses the status of prenominal and postnominal adjectives in Arabic. It is argued that Kremers’s treatment of adjectives is non-economic as it generates two different syntactic representations for prenominal and postnominal adjectives. It also undermines endocentric properties of phrasal projections and fails to correctly predict the definiteness status of adjectival construct state heads. The article proposes an alternative analysis with a single underlying syntactic structure for both types of adjectives. The need to have nominal features of the specifier (Spec) of the agreement phrase head (Agr) checked and licensed within the determiner phrase (DP) triggers leftward noun phrase (NP) movement, thus forming postnominal adjectives. In prenominal adjectives, however, the strong Definiteness Feature (DEF) on the determiner (D) causes the adjective phrase to raise to the specifier of the DP.

Highlights

Most of the traditional grammar written on classical Arabic depended on what native speakers of the language judged to be grammatical
The thrust of the argument is that the syntactic representations in (23) and (24) are isomorphic and the distinction between prenominal and postnominal adjectives is syntactically reduced to the featural strength of the definiteness feature on the determiner
Taking into account postnominal adjectives, the analysis proposed in the previous section assumes the movement of the whole noun phrase (NP) to the specifier of the agreement phrase

Summary

Introduction

Most of the traditional grammar written on classical Arabic depended on what native speakers of the language judged to be grammatical. In (9) and (10), the superlative precedes the nouns walad-i-n “boy” and alawlaad-i “the boys” but shows neither definiteness nor case agreement In both (9) and (10), the adjective constitutes the head of a CS with the following NP as the genitive complement. The adjectival CS in (12) is very similar to the nominal one structurally but rather expresses the superlative meaning of the adjective; the adjective akbar-u “oldest” is the head of the CS, and the noun walad-i-n “boy” is the genitive DP complement. The positive adjective al-jadeed-u “the new” in (15) describes qalam-u “pen” and agrees with it in number (singular), gender (masculine), definiteness (definite), and case (nominative) Such definiteness agreement on the adjective argues that the CS head qalam-u “pen” is definite. If POSS is valued as [+POSS], DEF is unvalued with neither the definite article al- nor the indefinite marker -n

Discussion

Conclusion