On the syntax of correlation: Evidence from Egyptian Arabic
The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze the syntax of
two types of correlation structures (CSs) in Egyptian Arabic (EA): A structure
introduced by the quantifier kull (‘every’), and another introduced
by the measure PP ʕalā Ɂadd (literally, ‘on/by amount’). More
specifically, it is shown that both types of structures involve subordination, where
the first clause is subordinate to the second. A syntactic analysis along the lines
of den Dikken (2005) and Taylor (2013) for comparative correlatives is
first shown to account for the main grammatical properties of both types of CSs in
EA. A cartographic implementation of the analysis is then proposed to account for a
wider range of empirical data related to CSs, including their information structure
properties. The data and analysis presented in this paper thus add to the body of
empirical literature on CSs cross-linguistically, while showing that their
grammatical properties do follow under standard syntactic analysis, and that
analyzing such structures as ‘constructional’ primitives of the grammar is
unnecessary.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The grammatical properties of correlation structures in EA
- 2.1Type A of correlation structures in EA
- 2.2Type B of correlation structures in EA
- 3.The macro-syntax of correlation structures
- 4.The micro-syntax of correlation structures
- 4.1Deriving correlation structures in EA
- 4.2Lexical doubling in CSs as a post-syntactic operation
- 4.3Summary
- 5.A cartographic analysis of the micro-syntax of correlation structures
- 6.Brief remarks on ‘constructions’
- 7.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References