Lebanese Arabic Clitics: A Typological Study
Wassim Al-Bekai
University of Balamand
The main concern of the proposed book is the study of pronominal markers in the Lebanese Arabic dialect (LA). In spite of a huge literature on this problem within European languages, as yet little research has been conducted on these elements in the LA dialect. The goal is to describe and analyze the pronominal markers attached to three different syntactic categories: verbs, prepositions and nouns. A description and analysis of LA subject and object markers attached to verbs is carried out. The aim is to test the status of these markers and to determine whether they are clitics or affixes. Central to our discussion is the ordering of objects in ditransitive verbs and the phenomenon of clitic doubling. The same path of research is followed by studying the object markers attached to transitive prepositions.
The final syntactic category under investigation is nouns. The possessive markers attached to nouns are considered clitics. These clitics in turn can be substituted by a full noun phrase forming the so-called construct state. It is argued that the second element in these constructions is a syntactically dependent element or a quasi-clitic. In addition, the construct state constructions along with other constructions such as the spurious construct state (SCS) are dealt with from a typological perspective of head-marking versus dependent-marking.
ISBN 9783862889235 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Afroasiatic Linguistics 38. 128pp. 2019.
