The Syntax of Questions in Modern Standard Arabic:: a Minimalist Perspective

This book examines the morpho-syntactic analysis of question particles and question words/phrases in a modern syntactic framework and provides the reader with a satisfactorily unified account of how questions are derived and represented in Standard Arabic in Chomsky?s Minimalist theory. The work has, therefore, been organized into six chapters. Chapter One surveys the views of the traditional Arab grammarians, Western grammarians and modern Arab linguists. Chapter Two presents the syntactic development of the analysis of questions from the point of view of their historical overview in English. Chapter Three introduces the broad outlines of Chomsky's Minimalism (1995; 1998; 1999; 2000) and question affix analysis and demonstrates how the latter works to account for the syntax of question particles in Standard Arabic. Chapter Four offers a formal treatment of question words and phrases in Standard Arabic and discusses their syntactic distribution in complement and adjunct positions. Chapter Five provides a unified treatment of the syntax of Wh- and multiple Wh-movement in Standard Arabic, English and the Slavic languages. Chapter Six summarizes the findings of the study.