Focus and Accusative Pronouns in Arabic

Abstract

F OCUS AND A CCUSATIVE P RONOUNS IN A RABIC ∗ D AVID T EEPLE University of California, Santa Cruz Keywords: Arabic, focus, pronouns, prosody 1 Introduction What I propose in this squib is a short and, I hope, sweet, analysis of Arabic accusative pronouns, and the conditions that determine whether the strong or weak form of the pronoun will appear. Like pronouns in other languages, Classical Arabic accusative pronouns occur in complementary distribution with full DPs. However, they do not generally appear in the same syntactic positions that a full DP would. Instead, they must affix to the verb, wherever it might be. This is reminiscent of verbal agreement morphology in Romance languages like French (Kayne 1975), and fellow Semitic languages like Hebrew (Arad 2005) and Amharic (Kramer 2009). Under contrastive focus, however, the strong forms of these pronouns are obliged to appear, and they do have the syntax of a normal DP. In section 4, I give an optimality-theoretic (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) analysis of the choice between strong and weak forms, and the associated choice between competing syntactic structures. Part of what makes this competition interesting is that morphological and syntactic structures must be evaluated in parallel. 2 Basic Syntax of Accusative Pronouns Under normal sentential focus, when a verb in Classical Arabic takes a pronominal object, that object is realized as a suffix on the verb. While the default word order in the absence of a pronoun is V-S-O (1a), a pronominal direct object gives V=O, regardless of where any other arguments sit (1b). The pronoun cannot, for instance, simply remain in situ and lean leftward onto the subject (1c). It must appear with the verb in T. 1 a. Parsala l-mudarris-u r-risa:lat-a Pila l-muearrir(-i) sent.3ms S DEF -teacher- NOM DEF -message- ACC to DEF -editor(- GEN ) ‘The teacher sent the message to the editor.’ (V-S-DO-IO) b. Parsala-ha: l-mudarris-u Pila l-muearrir(-i) sent.3ms S -3fs. ACC DEF -teacher- NOM to DEF -editor(- GEN ) ‘The teacher sent it to the editor.’ (V=DO-S-IO) c. *Parsala l-mudarris-u-ha: Pila l-muearrir(-i) sent.3ms S DEF -teacher- NOM -3fs. ACC to DEF -editor(- GEN ) Intended: ‘The teacher sent it to the editor.’ (*V-S=DO-IO) Thanks to the audience at the Oct. 23, 2007, UCSC Syntax Circle. Thanks also to Susan Steele and Matt Tucker for helpful reviews. Lastly, thanks to Jorge Hankamer for giving me the opportunity to torture undergraduate Morphology students with this problem. A note on the examples in (1) and throughout: Utterance-final case and indefinite marking are generally left unpronounced, hence the parentheses. These features are present morphosyntactically, but unrealized phonologically.

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