The Pronominal Copula in Arabic

Abstract

The literature on the syntax of verbless predication in Arabic is rich, but little attention has been given to the ‘pronominal copula’, PRON. Its main characteristics are well-known: it only takes the form of third person independent pronouns; it is limited to equational sentences, in which the predicate is a definite noun phrase; and it must always occur between the subject and the predicate nominal. A standard view (e.g. Eid 1991, and more recently, Ouhalla 2013) has been to assume that PRON, like its verbal counterpart KN, realizes subject agreement in T. In this paper, I examine the syntax of PRON and review its characteristics in contrast with those of KN. I show that the complex distribution of PRON challenges the standard view and supports an alternative analysis. I propose that equational sentences are underlyingly more complex than predicational verbless sentences: they project an extra functional head F between T and the small clause structure, PredP, in which the non-verbal predicate and its subject are generated. PRON is in FP, while KN is in T. I argue that, because equational sentences involve two elements of the same category, i.e. DP, they are subject to the Distinctness Condition of Richards (2010). FP provides the Spell-Out domain boundary necessary to avoid a Distinctness violation. Finally, I suggest that FP is always headed by a pronominal element that functions as a linker (Philip 2012, Franco et al. 2015), a syntactic head which marks an existing grammatical relation, namely predication, between two DPs. More broadly, my account is in line with the view that the identity/predicational divide in copular sentences corresponds to a difference in syntactic structure.