The ‘believe’-construction in Standard Arabic

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis for the ‘believe’-construction in Standard Arabic (SA). The analysis proposed here assumes theVisibility Condition, whereby structural Case is necessary to render arguments visible at LF for θ-role assignment (Aoun 1979, Chomsky 1981). The earlier approaches are untenable because they do not make proper provision for the Case-visibility requirements of the complement clause of ‘believe’. Thus, they are not extendable to SA since they ignore the Case-visibility requirements of the CP complement ofð̣anna‘believe’, assuming that CPs require Case for visibility (Uriagereka 2006, 2008). These requirements can be satisfied if we assume the distinction between structural Case and lexical case established in Al-Balushi (2011: 126–157) based on SA data, where structural Case is licensed on arguments and lexical case is assigned to non-arguments, nominals merged in A-bar positions. I thus propose that the Acc-marked DP (embedded subject/matrix object) does not receive structural Acc Case from the matrix v*0, but rather lexical Acc case from the matrix predicateð̣anna, as a lexical element, reserving the structural Acc Case for the CP argument. I also argue that this DP is an A-bar element, co-indexed with an empty category argumentproin the embedded clause.