Arabic PPs in a Rooted Lexicon

Abstract

We motivate a ‘rooted’ PP shell analysis of Arabic prepositional phrases, which takes into account the prepositional dual life, as a lexical item and as a functor or vocabulary word: a lexical √RootP headed by P, and a functional pP headed by p, the case assigner. PlaceP and PathP projections are motivated for differentiating distinct locative and directional PPs, and AxPartPs are involved in the structure of adverbial spatial nouns (đ̣uruuf). It is shown that alternative (cognitive) analyses using a single source (or projection) of PPs are inadequate in dealing with prepositional polysemies, and their semantic or morphosyntactic alternations or variations. A bifurcation analysis that distinguishes root syntax from category syntax is proposed along the lines of distributive models (Halle and Marantz, 1993; Harley 2014, Wood & Marantz, 2017, or Author 1 et al. (2021) for Arabic).

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