The Active Participle in Hijazi Arabic: An LFG Perspective

Abstract

This thesis attempts to provide both a formal and a descriptive account of Act.Ptcps by investigating the three distinct types of such participles in Hijazi Arabic via: (i) analyzing the syntactic contexts in which they are employed, and (ii) exploring their semantic properties. Different kinds of evidence and arguments are presented, and they weigh for treating nominal and adjectival act.ptcps as NPs and APs, respectively. With respect to deverbal act.ptcps, the types of evidence and arguments for analyzing such participles as non-finite inflectional forms of verbs are too strong to ignore. However, since deverbal act.ptcps differ from regular VPs in that they do not mark tense and person values, they should be syntactically represented as a constituent-structure category of VPptc.