Features Between Form and Interpretation: The Effect of Animacy, Gender, and Number on Verbal Agreement Sara Omar A. Benduhaish Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Languages, Cultures and Societies September 2018 ii Academic Integrity The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Sara Benduhaish to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2018 September The University of Leeds and Sara Benduhaish iii This PhD thesis is dedicated to my mother Fawzia Al-Nafea, and to the memory of my late father, Dr Omar Benduhaish who would have been happy to see me follow his path iv Acknowledgements In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful All praise is due to Allah (SWT) for the blessing of completing this research. This thesis would not have been completed without the help of many people. My deepest gratitude is to my supervisor, Dr Diane Nelson, who was the first to introduce me to the notion of animacy when I was an MA student. Her deep knowledge, constructive feedback and patience in reading so many drafts of this thesis’s chapters have all been of inestimable value to me. This PhD thesis would not have been submitted in due time without her encouragement. Special thanks are due to my examiners, Professor James Dickins and Dr Peter Ackema for taking time during their busy schedule to read my thesis. I am grateful for the constructive comments and discussion during the viva, which undoubtedly served to the betterment of this thesis. Special gratitude is due to the Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau in London for the financial and academic support provided during my scholarship in England. Thanks are due to King Faisal University for facilitating every step of my scholarship. Thanks and gratitude are due to my beloved University of Leeds for the support, guidance, postgraduate workshops, online help and rich libraries throughout the time I spent in Leeds for my MA and PhD degrees. Thanks to Dr Abdullah Alfaifi who introduced me to the two MSA corpora I used for the data in this thesis. He has been always very welcoming and patient in explaining and answering all my questions. My profound gratitude is due to my family back in Saudi Arabia. I thank my lovely mother for her constant prayers for me, daily calls, financial support and—most v importantly—for bringing me up to be the person I am today. Special thanks go to my sister, Dr Rania, whose genuine passion to learn has always inspired me to be the best I can. I thank my brothers Adel and Basel and their lovely wives for their endless love and support. I thank my father-in-law for always being the father I missed and for his unconditional support and constant prayers. My deepest and sincerest gratitude is due to my husband, Majed, for standing next to me, believing in me and putting me at the top of his priorities. I thank him for providing me with the best environment for research and for always looking after our two little boys during my periods of long and frequent absence. I thank my two bundles of joy, Abdullatif and Omar, for their patience and unconditional love even with me not always being free and present to play with them. Finally, I thank all my relatives and friends for their calls and texts to ask about me and my studies. Your encouragement is very much appreciated. vi Abstract This thesis critically analyses the intriguing behaviour of plural inanimate nouns triggering partial agreement in subject–verb–object (SVO) word order in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The analysis focuses on three significant morphosyntactic features of agreement: animacy, gender and number. I follow integrated theoretical assumptions of current Minimalism and Distributed Morphology (DM). I operate on the consonantal root-and-pattern property of MSA to argue for a DM approach to feature analysis. I argue that assignment of gender values takes place during syntax before PF whereas the exponence of agreement features takes place post- syntactically at phonological form. I argue for a decompositional analysis for the structure of determiner phrase (DP) in which agreement features are not located at the same syntactic head within the nominal. Following Ritter (1993) and Zabbal (2002), number heads its own syntactic projection, and thus number phrase (NumP) is the syntactic locus for inflectional number values of the nominal. I argue for two locations for number values: NumP, which hosts the distributive reading, and n, which hosts the collective reading interpretation. I also argue for a decompositional analysis of nP in which there are two ns; the closest to the root hosts the interpretable gender that is assigned based on the semantic properties of the nominal, whereas the higher n hosts the uninterpretable gender assigned arbitrarily to the noun. I argue that this structure provides a satisfactory analysis for the agreement behaviour of mixed-agreement nouns. With respect to agreement, I argue for an Agree-based approach in which the probe enters into an Agree relationship with a goal in its c-commanding domain. Following Doron (2000), I assume that the presence of an Extended Projection Principle feature on T is optional and conditioned by the goal’s capability to move to [Spec, TP]. vii List of Abbreviations 1 First person 2 Second person 3 Third person √C1C2C3 Consonantal root √P Root phrase ACC Accusative case Adj Adjective AdjP Adjectival phrase Adv Adverb AspP Aspect phrase Aux Auxiliary COLL Collective CP Complementiser phrase CSC Coordinate structure constraint +D Dual number D Determiner DM Distributed Morphology DP Determiner phrase EPP Extended Projection Principle F Feminine in linguistic examples GB Government and Binding viii GEN Genitive case GenP Gender Phrase Impf Imperfective LA Lebanese Arabic LF Logical form M Masculine MSA Modern Standard Arabic Neg Negation NP Noun phrase NumP Number phrase n Nominalising head nP Nominalising head phrase NOM Nominative case PF Phonological form PP Prepositional phrase S Singular SVO Subject–verb–object T Tense TP Tense phrase U Unspecified gender uV Unvalued Phi-features of the verb v ‘little’ v ix VO Verb–object vop vocalic pattern VP Verb phrase VSO Verb–subject–object x Table of Contents Academic Integrity ................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. iv Abstract .................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... x List of Tables ......................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction—Basic Overview of the Syntax of Modern Standard Arabic ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Setting the scene ............................................................................................... 2 1.2 The Scope of the thesis and research questions ................................................ 5 1.3 The organisation of the thesis ........................................................................... 6 1.4 Preliminaries of Arabic language and syntax ................................................... 8 1.4.1 Word order in Modern Standard Arabic .................................................... 9 1.4.2 Nominal morphology in Arabic ................................................................. 9 1.4.3 Verbal Morphology in Arabic .................................................................. 14 1.5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2: Previous Treatments of Agreement in Arabic .................................. 17 2.1 Factors conditioning agreement patterns in Arabic ........................................ 17 2.1.1 The nature of the pre-verbal noun phrase in Modern Standard Arabic ... 17 2.1.2 Word order ............................................................................................... 23 2.2 Previous analyses of agreement in MSA ........................................................ 25 2.2.1 Pre-Minimalist analysis of agreement in MSA ........................................ 25 2.2.2 Minimalist analyses of agreement in Arabic ........................................... 28 2.2.3 Post-syntactic treatment of partial agreement in Arabic .......................... 33 2.3 Other typological treatments of agreement in Arabic ..................................... 35 2.4 Conclusion and notes for gaps in the literature covered in this thesis ............ 36 Chapter 3: Data and Methodology Used in the Thesis ........................................ 39 3.1 Data for the thesis ........................................................................................... 39 3.1.1 Corpus extraction ....................................................................................