The comparative syntax of four Arabic dialects: An investigation of selected topics

This study aims at a preliminary investigation of the syntax of four Arabic dialect areas: Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Kuwait. The investigation focuses on certain syntactic features that vary from dialect to dialect, and whose linguistic analysis presents particular problems not previously addressed. This thesis emphasizes the importance of semantic and pragmatic factors to syntactic analysis. Syntactic features are viewed as continuums, rather than rules, and the motivation behind syntactic variation is sought.;The syntactic features treated herein include elements of the nominal system, the verbal system, word order, and clause structure. In Chapter One, traditional analyses of nominal marking as definite or indefinite are shown to be inadequate in explaining spoken Arabic data. The concept of individuation developed by Khan and others is shown to be essential to understanding nominal behavior. Chapter Two examines the roles of tense and aspect in the verbal system of spoken Arabic. Following Eisele, the morphological verb forms, the perfective, imperfective, and participle, are seen to correspond to aspects, which are called here perfective, imperfective, and perfect. Discourse context is shown to affect the use of verb forms in several ways. Chapter Three demonstrates the importance of both sentence topic and discourse topic to the analysis of word order and sentence structure in spoken Arabic. Negation, treated in Chapter Four, represents an area in which these dialects are closely parallel in ways not previously recognized, for they share three discernible strategies: verbal negation, predicate-compliment negation, and categorical negation.;This study concludes that the syntactic structure of these Arabic dialects is overwhelmingly similar. Minor differences emerge, such as the variation of interrogative structure, and the occasional divergence of one dialect from the basic patterns shared by others. These differences may provide a starting point for further research, both synchronic and diachronic.