The Argument Flagging and Indexing Construction in the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Baghdad

Abstract

Abstract The Jewish dialect of Baghdad employs a particular construction to mark constituents of the clause as arguments. This construction typically marks the argument twice—once by the morpheme l- and once by a pronominal suffix that agrees with the argument. Syntactically, the former has the properties of a flag and the latter of a person index. The construction, which we call THE ARGUMENT FLAGGING AND indexing construction, primarily assigns the argument with the syntactic function of a direct or an indirect object, but it is also capable of marking oblique and genitive arguments. This paper focuses on the morpho-syntactic properties of the construction. It presents the mechanism by which the argument is marked and describes how the syntactic function is assigned.