Subject-verb agreement in Arabic

Abstract

Agreement in grammar refers to formal relationship between elements, whereby a form of one word conforms to the form of another. The preservation of agreement between a controlling phrase and a controlled phrase under various conditions provides a clear indication that agreement relations are sensitive to linear or directional properties, otherwise, we would expect agreement to be affected by word order changes. In this paper I shall work on subject-verb agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) whose rich inflectional agreement system is fascinating. I intend to examine its rich agreement patterns in the minimalist framework and find out the structural mechanism of the assignment system followed by a detailed study of the three phi- features in Arabic, i.e. person, number, and gender. This paper will address the following issues of subject-verb agreement in Arabic: a) why the verb in VSO order does not show the person and number agreement and only shows gender agreement with the post-verbal subject and b) the ambiguity of the first person in Arabic that is unspecified.