Exclusive particles in Hijazi Arabic and English: a formal alternative-semantic analysis
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of the HA exclusive particle BAS through implementing a contrastive approach that draws comparisons between BAS and its English counterpart ONLY. This crosslinguistic investigation reveals a major syntactic distinction between BAS and ONLY. Unlike ONLY, BAS can have leftward focus association. This particular property is discussed in detail in the dissertation since it is a unique phenomenon that is relatively rare in exclusive particles crosslinguistically. The syntactic analysis of BAS in this research provides sufficient ground rules to make the decision of selecting the most suitable formal semantic analysis for BAS. The indirect analysis is shown to be the best semantic analysis for BAS since it captures all the syntactic and semantic properties of BAS. The dissertation concludes with an important observation about the compatibility of the indirect analysis with different focus-sensitive particles and across different languages.