A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PREPOSITION STRANDING IN ARABIC DIALECTS

Abstract

Preposition stranding occurs with wh-movement in some languages. Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Arabic do not allow P-stranding in information questions or sluicing (Algryani 2010; Btoosh 2010; Algryani 2018). Works on other dialects of Arabic, such as Emirati Arabic (Leung 2014), Omani Arabic (Algryani 2019), and Iraqi Arabic (Albuarabi 2019), show that these dialects have P-stranding in sluicing (S/TP deletion following wh-movement; Ross 1967), but prevent P-stranding in wh-questions. These studies argue against the P-stranding generalization (PSG) of Merchant (2001), which asserts that a language should have P-stranding in wh-questions in order to have it in sluicing. The present thesis shows that Najdi Arabic (NA) has P-stranding in regular wh-questions and sluicing, in keeping with Merchant’s PSG, and furthermore it is consistent with Abels’ (2003) generalization for P-stranding languages in light of the Anti-locality Hypothesis. This thesis proposes that P-stranding in NA is licensed by a layer of functional structure within PP which I propose is lacking in other dialects that ban P-stranding in wh-questions.