A nominal shell analysis of restrictive relative clause constructions in Tripolian Libyan Arabic

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study deals with the phenomenon of restrictive relative clause constructions in Tripolian Libyan Arabic (TL-Arabic), a variety of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in and around Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The study has two main objectives. Firstly, the empirical objective is to give a detailed description of the facts of relative pronouns and relative clause constructions in TL-Arabic, which has not previously been attempted in the literature. As will be shown, TL-Arabic has only one element functioning as a relative pronoun, namely elly. Depending on the grammatical context, this pronoun corresponds to a range of relative pronouns in English, such as 'who, 'which, 'whose, 'where, 'when, etc. The focus of the investigation is on the morphophonological properties of the relative pronoun, the structural positions in which it can occur, as well as on the grammatical functions of the matrix clause expression containing the relative clause (e.g. subject, direct object, etc.). Although the emphasis is on restrictive relative clauses, attention is also given to two other types of relative clause that occur in TL-Arabic, namely non-restrictive relative clauses (also known as appositive relative clauses) and free relative clauses. The second main objective is to provide an analysis of restrictive relative clause constructions in TL-Arabic within the broad theoretical framework of generative grammar. More specifically, an attempt is made to develop a minimalist generative account of the TL-Arabic facts within the framework of the analysis of restrictive relative clauses in Afrikaans put forward by Meyer (2015). The core hypotheses of Meyer's analysis are based largely on the ideas underlying Oosthuizen's (2013) Nominal Shell Analysis of obligatory reflexivity. In developing the TL-Arabic analysis, the focus falls on two main questions: (i) what are the specific steps in the derivation of restrictive relative clauses in TL-Arabic? and (ii) precisely how and by means of which mechanisms is the coreferential relationship between the relative pronoun and its antecedent established? In broad terms, it is argued that the relative pronoun elly and the expression that will eventually serve as its antecedent are initially merged into the same nominal shell construction, more specifically an nP with a contrastive-focus light noun n as its head. The light noun takes the relative pronoun as its complement and the antecedent expression as its specifier. Unlike the light noun and the relative pronoun, the antecedent has a set of valued phi (φ)-features (person, number, gender), which serves to value the φ-features of the relative pronoun with the light noun serving as intermediary. In this configuration the φ-valued relative pronoun is then semantically interpreted as obligatory coreferential with the expression in the specifier position of the nP. Several operations are subsequently applied to raise the relative pronoun and its antecedent into their respective surface positions. Employing the Split-CP hypothesis of Rizzi (1997) and Benincà and Poletto (2004), and in line with the analysis proposed for Afrikaans by Meyer (2015), it is argued that the relative pronoun ends up in the specifier position of a Contrastive Focus phrase in the left-periphery of the relative clause. In the course of the discussion attention is also given to two instances of obligatory agreement relationships in TL-Arabic, namely between (i) a subject marker (SM) and the subject argument of a sentence and (ii) an object marker (OM) and the direct object argument. Following Elghariani (2016), it is argued that both these relationships can be accounted for in terms of essentially the same nominal shell analysis as proposed for relative pronouns and their antecedents, but with the nominal shell in these cases headed by an identity-focus light noun. The main finding of the study is that the proposed nominal shell analysis provides an adequate description and explanation of the facts of restrictive relative clauses in TL-Arabic, without requiring any theoretical devices not already available within the broad generative minimalist framework.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University