Abstract

With my belief that there is not a comprehensive theory of adverb position, Iatridou (1990), Bobaljik & Jonas (1996), in this paper, I investigate the morph-syntax and distribution of adverbs in one of the Saudi dialects, Saudi Northern Region Dialect of Arabic (SNRDA); a dialect that is spoken in the Northern Region of Saudi Arabia. I will show that adverbs at least in SNRDA are not descriptively as simple as it is assumed for other dialects of Arabic studied by Nuha (2005) and in the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) investigated by Fassi (1997, 1998). What is interesting in this dialect is that intonation plays role in where the adverbs appear and how they are interpreted; in addition, with the change of the adverb position, there is a change in the meaning. The contribution of this paper is that it discusses adverbs in a dialect which many of its syntactic facts remain largely un-described and adds to our understanding of the syntactic behavior of the adverbs.

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