Arabic-L:LING:Coordination in EA response

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 06 Dec 2001
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1) Subject: Coordination in EA response
2) Subject: Coordination in EA response

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1)
Date:  06 Dec 2001
From: Farghaly01 at aol.com
Subject: Coordination in EA response

>>  Cristina Ximenes wrote
>>Diesing and Jelinek (1995) observes that in Egyptian Arabic, pronouns
>>are always cliticized to the verb and that the verb has to be
>>duplicated when pronouns are coordinated, as shown in (1). The
>>nteresting point is that (1b) may refer to only one event, despite
>>the double occurrence of the verb.

>>(1) a. *saaf-u   wi   hiyya
>>           saw-him  and  she
>>      b. saaf-u   wi  saaf-ha
>>.     saw-him  and saw-her
>>I would appreciate if I could get further references on such
>>phenomenon in Egyptian Arabic or other languages.


Pronouns in Arabic fall into two broad  categories: independent pronouns like
/ana/ 'I', /inta/ 'you masc.sing'. hiyya 'she' etc.  and cliticized pronouns
as '-ni' 'me' ,  /-na/ 'us'.  Indepndent pronouns have inherent nominative
case whereas clitcized pronouns can be either nominative, accusative or
genitive case.  pronouns can be  cliticized to verbs and  prepositions.

The ungrammaticality of (1a) is because 'hiyya' as in independent pronoun has
inherent nominative case, whereas the pronominal suffix -u is assigned
accusative case by virtue of being in an Argument position and governed by
the verb /shaaf/ . Coordinates have to be of the same syntactic category and
agree in case as well. Hence Arabic follows the universal principle that
requires coordinates to be of the same type.

(1b) does not necessarily refer to only one event. Consider:

(2) shaaf-u imbaariH  wishaf-ha innaharda ' he saw him yesterday and saw her
today'
The more acceptable way of saying 'He saw him and her' is shown below:

(3) shaaf-u  huwwa wi hiyya  ' He saw him and her'

Notice that in (3) both pronouns are of the same type (independent pronouns)
and both have inherent nominative case. Moreover neither of the pronouns in
(3) is adjacent to the verb which is a case assignor.    So there is no
violation of the Universal principle.

  Consider the difference in the grammaticality of (4a) and (4b).   The
sentence in (4a)  shows that the independent pronoun /hiyya/  cannot occupy
the argument position of the complement of the verb and that the verb fails
to assign accusative case to it whereas in (5b) the pronominal suffix is
governed by the verb and assigned accusative case  which renders the sentence
grammatical.

(4a) *ahmad shaaf hiyya
          Ahmed saw her
(4b) ahmad  shaf-ha
          Ahmed saw her

  These observations also hold for most Arabic varieties including Classical
Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic.  The Interesting point here is that
pronominal clitics and independent pronouns are not considered to be of the
same type in Arabic.  More research is needed in this area.

Ali Farghaly
Senior Linguist
YY Technologies

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2)
Date:  06 Dec 2001
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: Coordination in EA response

  See Bloch, a. *Studies in Arabic Syntax and Semantics*
Harrossowitz  Wiesbaden  1986.ISBN 3-447-02501-8. pp.  1--13,
"Balancing."
   Please note:  Only sentences  of the type:  /katabtu  'anaa
wa-zaydun/ are permitted in the Qur'aan; not: */katabtu wa-zaydun/.
Also, in Q, only sentence of the type /ra'ay-tu-hu wa-zaydan/ occur
(as opposed to */ra'ay-tu-hu  [/huwa/ OR /'iyyaahu/]
wa-zaydan/].
      Best wishes,
                                          Mike Schub

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End of Arabic-L:  06 Dec 2001