Arabic-L:LING:Arabic yes/no questions

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 23 Nov 2010
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Arabic yes/no questions
2) Subject: Arabic yes/no questions
2) Subject: Arabic yes/no questions

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1)
Date: 23 Nov 2010
From: Alexander Magidow <amagidow at gmail.com>
Subject: Arabic yes/no questions

[moderator's note: Alex is right.  Here is the missing contact info: May Mahdi Al-Ramadan <mal_ramadan at hotmail.com>; I will go ahead and forward these messages to her.  dil)

Hey Dil,

I don't think you included the contact info for May in the message quoted below, so I'm sending this to you directly.

First, I don't think "hal" is a complementizer in the sense that it is used elsewhere in the language to introduce complements. I would argue that it is a polarity question marker, something attested quite widely in the world's languages.  Obviously a generative explanation might confuse the two, since in such an analysis this marker might occur in the CP (complementizer-phrase) position, based on what I remember of G&B style syntax (and therefore conflict with movement to CP by verbs for purposes of inversion). However, strictly functionally speaking, there is a difference between a complementizer and an interrogative particle. 

In any case, a good place to start would be König, Ekkehard and Petere Siemund. 2007. `Speech act distinctions in grammar' in Shopen, Timothy (ed). Language Typology and Linguistic Description, 2nd edition, in Vol 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. They have a nice section devoted to the typology of polar interrogatives, and actually say "Interrogative particles also occur in constituent interrogatives [e.g. polar interrogatives marked by a change in constituent order from declarative clauses], but mostly optionally so (p.14)" This would appear to contradict Carnie.  If May does not have access to that work, I can email her a PDF. 

Also, it's interesting to note that Moroccan Arabic has innovated an interrogative particle("wash"), though I don't believe there's constituent inversion as well. Masri "huwa" ("huwwa ma-fii-sh hadd guwwa?" 'is there nobody inside?'[Hinds-Badawi p. 918]) might also be argued to be some form of interrogative particle. 

You can feel free to repost this to the list also.

Alex Magidow

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2)
Date: 23 Nov 2010
From: Brian Huebner <bhuebner2 at gmail.com>
Subject: Arabic yes/no questions

That's a question? ;)

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3)
Date: 23 Nov 2010
From: Muhamed Al Khalil <oryxius at gmail.com>
Subject: Arabic yes/no questions

Dear May,

The analogy between inversion in yes/no question forming in Arabic and English (and other languages) is a bit misleading. Arabic applies no inversion in yes/no question forming: 

هل أحضر الطالب الكتاب؟
أحضر الطالب الكتاب؟
الطالب أحضر الكتاب؟

If you remove هل and the question marks, you get three affirmative sentences (either nominal or verbal, with no significant difference between them apart from emphasis). In the case of the questions without هل , the interrogative is indicated by intonation only. The seeming "inversion" in Arabic is in fact an acceptable syntactical order for the sentence regardless of whether it is affirmative, interrogative, or negative for that matter. In a sense, Carnie is right: Arabic's yes/no questions do not use inversion, only the particles أ، هل or intonation. 

Hope this helps. 

Muhamed Osman Al Khalil, Ph.D.
Director of Arabic Studies
New York University Abu Dhabi

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