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Bookmark and Share Paper 3476

On Two Types of Correlation Structures in Egyptian Arabic
Usama Soltan
316-325 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Often cited for their grammatical idiosyncrasies, comparative correlatives of the type represented in English by examples such as The more you read, the more you understand have been argued to provide evidence for the need to posit 'constructions' as syntactic primitives in the grammar (Fillmore 1987, McCawley 1988, Culicover and Jackendoff 1999). The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze 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 ʔadd (literally, 'on/by amount'). More specifically, it is shown that both types of CSs involve cases of subordination, where the first clause is adjoined to the second clause. A syntactic analysis along the lines of den Dikken (2005) and Taylor (2013) for comparative correlatives is then proposed to account for the grammatical properties of both types of CSs. The data and analysis presented in this paper thus add to the existing body of empirical literature on CSs in human languages, while providing support to a theory of grammar where heads are the only atoms needed in the syntax and where 'constructions' remain strictly epiphenomenal.

Published in

Proceedings of the 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Richard Stockwell, Maura O'Leary, Zhongshi Xu, and Z.L. Zhou
Table of contents
Printed edition: $395.00