| This thesis is concerned with the word order variations in Standard Arabic with special emphasis on the sentence-initial position. It offers a fresh look at this subject. Different word orders are considered within a more functionally oriented approach, a move facilitated by adopting a theoretical framework which allows such considerations. Factors such as pragmatics and discourse related phenomena are dealt with in the domain of the lexicon.;All possible "surface" orders in SA are assumed to be "basic." Each order is appropriate, or even required, for a particular situation for which any other order is ruled out as inappropriate, hence unacceptable. This assumption deems ordering devices, such as movement transformations, unnecessary. As a matter of fact, transformations are dispensed with because they yield undesired results.;A new classification for the SA lexicon is suggested. According to this classification all "grammatical" words are sorted in one class. This is referred to as the X-class.;General ordering rules suggested in Brame (1981) are supported for SA, and language-specific ordering rules are proposed.;The theoretical framework adopted and advocated in this study is the lexically based theory as suggested in Brame (1978) and developed in Brame (1979), (1980), (1981) and (1982) and by Yildirim (1978), Guerssel (1979), Hoji (1981), El Tekaina (1982) and others. |
