Concord and agreement features in Modern Standard Arabic

What it is about

A short squib on adjective agreement in MSA. Attributive adjectives agree with their noun in gender, number, definiteness and case. Predicative adjectives agree only in gender and number: they are always indefinite, and their case depends on the tense of the copular clause and on whether a complementizer is present. The author proposes a split within Distributed Morphology. Gender and number are agreement features, valued in the syntax by Bidirectional Agree. Definiteness and case are concord features, copied at PF onto an AGR node that sits under the adjective, and this copying only happens inside the DP. In past and future copular clauses an overt copula assigns accusative to the predicative adjective. Where no case is assigned, the adjective takes the default case, nominative. The paper gives no numerical evaluation; it argues from a set of examples, most from fieldwork and from Ryding (2005).

Ideas

• I1. Keep two sets of features for adjectives. Gender and number come from agreement with the head noun on any adjective, attributive or predicative. Definiteness is copied from the noun only on attributive adjectives. In Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals, this is a rule to test: the definite article on an adjective should follow the noun only in attributive position, and never in predicative position (the Hebrew copula clause הילד גבוה against הילד הגבוה).
• I2. Treat an unvalued feature as a value of its own (realised by the default form), and do not treat it as missing. In Mova's feature tables, an unmarked form then gets a default value and not an absent one. The same idea helps with the Aramaic absolute state in The noun in Biblical Aramaic.
• I3. Test set: the verbless clauses with a predicative adjective, sorted by tense and by presence of a copula. This is a small gold set for 7. Syntax and for the copula handling in prag.

For Mova

I1 goes into Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals and into the feature step of tools/hbo when it later reads Modern Hebrew. I2 is a convention for the feature model in world and The noun in Biblical Aramaic. I3 is a test set for 7. Syntax.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.710

@article{winchester2019concord,
  title = {{Concord and agreement features in Modern Standard Arabic}},
  author = {Winchester, Lindley},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.710},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.710}
}

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27. How to cite this article: Winchester, Lindley. 2019. Concord and agreement features in Modern Standard Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 91. 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.710 ↗ our card
28. Published: 06 August 2019 find
29. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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