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1 results

  • Why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic are verbless

  • Rashid Al-Balushi
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique / Volume 57 / Issue 1 / March 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 June 2016, pp. 1-30

  • This article aims to account for why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic lack a copular verb. In contrast to previous accounts which attribute the absence of the copula to some defect of present tense, I claim that a verbless sentence does not take a copula because its nominais do not need structural Case. The proposed analysis argues that structural Case is licensed by a “Verbal Case” feature on the relevant Case-checking heads, and assumes the Visibility Condition. The present analysis is based on a unique interaction between tense and word order, and on the observation that verbless sentences are finite clauses composed of a topic and a predicate, as well as on the observation that they do not involve licensing of structural Case.