Abstract

Recent analyses of word order in Standard Arabic and the regional varieties of Arabic have assumed that the postverbal subject in the VSO word order in these languages is actually in-situ in its base position in spec-vP (Fassi Fehri, 1993; Ouhalla, 1994; Shlonsky, 1997; Benmamoun, 2000 et al.). In this paper, I provide an alternative analysis in which the postverbal subject in the VSO word order is assumed to have vacated its base-position in spec-vP and moved to the left of the vP projection. I take this new position of the postverbal subject to be the specifier position of the functional head Subj that heads a projection between vP and TP (Kayne, 2000; Belletti, 2004; Ordonez, 2005). Arguments that support this assumption come from the comparison of Standard Arabic and Sana’ani Arabic, through examining the distribution of postverbal subjects with respect to quantifiers, adverbs, pronominal clitics and restructuring contexts. This paper introduces new evidence to the effect that a detailed cartography of the postverbal area in these languages can provide a relatively minimal account for parametric differences in postverbal subject position(s) in other related languages.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.