LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:8 August 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Spatial Prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic

Mustafa Ahmed Al-humari, Ph.D. Scholar

Abstract

The paper investigates syntactic and semantic properties of spatial prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). In this paper, I argue that the so-called, by traditional grammarians, dhruuf al-makaan ‘Adverbs of Place’ such as fawq ‘above’, tahta ‘under’, xalf ‘behind’ etc are just another class of prepositions. Hence, there are two classes of preposition in Arabic: Class 1 Prepositions (henceforth C1 Ps) which contain true prepositions such as ?ala ‘on’, fi ‘in’ etc, and Class 2 Prepositions (henceforth C2 Ps) which contain a group of so-called adverbs of Place. To motivate my argument for existence of two classes of prepositions in MSA, certain diagnostics are set in line with Svenonius’s (2004, 2006) Axial Part (henceforth AxPart) and Pantcheva’s (2008) Silent Place. Further, I attempt to unify these proposals in order to capture the co-occurrence of Silent Place and AxPart in the language.

Keywords: spatial prepositions, Modern Standard Arabic, syntactic and semantic properties

1. Overview and Theoretical Issues

In this paper, I follow the same idea in the traditional grammar books of Arabic (e.g., Wright (1874), Haywood & Nahmad (1965), Sibawayhi (1938), Ibn Siraj (1986) and Al-shamsan (1987) among others) that a preposition is a semantic letter associated with nouns; it changes the Case-marking when inserted. In MSA, prepositions can be either morphologically separated from nouns e.g. min ‘from’ ila ‘to’ fi ‘in/at’ etc or attached to the noun e.g. li- (for/to), ka- (like/as). Interestingly, prepositions are literally called hruuf al-garr ‘Letters of Genitives’ in Arabic because they associate with genitive-marked nouns. That is, a preposition is responsible for licensing of a genitive Case on the noun phrase complement. However, this does not necessarily mean that we could not think of a situation where a genitive Case is assigned without presence of a P Case-assigner. The noun phrase complement in Construct State and that in dhruuf al-makaan ‘Adverbs of Place’ are clear evidence to support this conclusion. This line of reasoning results in an inquiry: whether a genitive Case can also be assigned by another category, an adverb for instance and to what extent the two distinct categories might share some properties.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mustafa Ahmed Al-humari, Ph.D. Scholar
Centre for Linguistics, SLL & CS
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067
India
mustafa4008@gmail.com
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