Hejazi Arabic Interrogatives

Abstract

The syntax of interrogatives has been of interest to researchers cross-linguistically. Thus, this dissertation aims to investigate the mechanism of forming HA wh-questions and provide a theoretical account for the interrogative interpretation of the questions. HA interrogatives are classified into two types; typical interrogatives and Class II interrogatives. In typical interrogatives, the wh-phrase optionally moves to the left peripheral position of the question or remains in-situ. In Class II interrogatives, the wh phrase is allowed to appear in either peripheral position. Each type is tested to island constraints to detect wh-movement in their formation. Moreover, other diagnostic tests are performed such as intervention effects that block LF wh-movement in wh-in-situ. After the introduction, the nature of HA is presented briefly. Then, some of the basic theoretical accounts concerning the wh-movement and wh-in-situ are discussed in which the Minimal Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001) and the Split CP System (Rizzi 1997) are presented briefly, followed by different arguments to account for the wh-scope in wh-in-situ, namely, Unselective Binding Theory (Pesetsky 1987) and Clausal Typing Hypothesis (Cheng 1997). The section of typical interrogatives includes a descriptive presentation of the fronted and in-situ wh-questions, a discussion of other Arabic varieties’ analyses compared to HA, the test of this type toward island constraints, empirical evidence that the position of the wh-phrase is focus position according to Split CP System (Rizzi 1997), a representation of the optionality of T-to C movement in fronted wh-questions. It also includes a discussion against the LF wh movement of wh-in-situ, and the final analysis of HA typical interrogatives. After that, in the Class II interrogatives section, the basic characteristics are introduced to make a clear difference between this type and the former one, the subject-object asymmetry with respect to the gap associated with the wh-phrase is discussed, the inapplicability of adjunct wh-phrase in this type is represented. Then, some of the previous analyses of this construction are discussed and compared. Afterward, this type is tested to island constraints. Later the parallelism between Class II interrogatives and cleft constructions is performed. Finally, the analysis of this type is presented in detail. In the typical interrogatives, the wh-movement is employed in the formation of fronted wh-questions. However, the T-to-C movement shows optionality that is attributed to the presence or absence of the [TNS] feature in C. As for wh-in-situ, it is attested that they do not employ covert wh-movement. Therefore, the interrogative reading is interpreted via unselective binding in which a base-generated interrogative operator in C binds the wh phrase whether it is in-situ or fronted regardless of the wh-movement. Class II interrogatives receive the analysis of wh-clefts since they show parallelism to the cleft constructions. In this analysis, the wh-phrase is base-generated in subject position and binds the nominal copula in a subject-predicate relationship. This nominal copula binds the free relative CP that is headed by the complementizer alli ‘that’ in another subject predicate relationship. Moreover, similarly to typical interrogatives, the interrogative reading is interpreted via a base-generated interrogative operator in C that binds the wh phrase.