Publications [#326447] of Abbas Benmamoun

Papers Published

1. Benmamoun, E, Agreement parallelism between sentences and noun phrases: A historical sketch, Lingua, vol. 113 no. 8 (August, 2003), pp. 747-764, Elsevier BV .
   (last updated on 2024/04/25)

   Abstract:
   This paper deals with a parallelism between sentences and noun phrases in Classical Arabic. The parallelism in question concerns the distribution of the number feature on the verb in the verb subject (VS) sequence and the (in-)definiteness feature on nouns in the N+NP sequence, the so-called semitic construct state (CS). In both cases, the verb and the head noun do not carry number and (in-)definiteness features respectively. Previous syntactic analyses have treated these two problems as two separate phenomena, thus denying any parallelism between the two constructions. This paper argues that this parallelism is genuine and is due to the verb in the VS sequence being historically a nominal element in a CS relation with the subject. © 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.