ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Al-Zahrani
Mohammad Ali Al-Zahrani (University of Queensland)
moali66@hotmail.com
Hijazi Negative Particles and their Interaction with the HA Modals
The research in the vernacular varieties of Saudi Arabic is minimal though there
are systematic differences between the Standard Arabic (SA), which is the official
language of Saudi Arabia as well as of most of the Arabic World, and the spoken
varieties. To illustrate this, this paper examines the morphosyntactic properties of
the negative particles in Hijazi Arabic (HA) (a dialect descended from Standard
Arabic and spoken in the Western Province of Saudi Arabia). Benmamoun (1996,
2000) argues that there are only two underlying negatives in Standard Arabic laa
and maa. The other negatives, lam, lamma, laata, lan, and laysa are all inflected
variants and suppletive forms of the negative particle laa. This diversity is the result
of their different uses with respect to their syntactic properties. On the one hand,
the negative particles laa, maa, and laysa can come with both nominal and verbal
sentences while the negative laata is particular to nouns denoting time. The
negative particles laa, laysa, lam, lamma and lan are restricted to the imperfective
form of verbs. This paper argues that while the load in SA is on the negative
laa and its variants, it has shifted from laa into maa and its variants in HA. I show
that in HA maa has two allomorphs [muu] and [mee] where the allomorph [muu]
has been derived from the constituent of the negative particle maa and the singular
masculine pronoun huu, i.e., maa huu, before the deletion of the consonant
/h/. Likewise, the negative allomorph [mee] has been composed from the negative
maa and the singular feminine pronoun hee, i.e. maa hee, before the /h/
deletion. Yet, muu, but not mee, has been frozen to be the unmarked negative for
masculine and feminine subjects. I also show the ways in which the HA negatives,
maa, laa, muu and mee do interact with the MPs laazim, laabud, yajib, yibgha
l-, Daroori, almafrooD, (necessity MP), yimkin and mumkin (possibility MPs). The HA
negatives may head the entire clause to negate the whole proposition or they
may follow MPs to negate their complements.
References
Benmamoun, E 1996, ’Negative Polarity and Presupposition in Arabic’, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, vol. 8, pp. 47-66.
Benmamoun, E 2000, The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A comparative study on Arabic dialects, Oxford
University Press, New York.