LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Case-Assignment under Government in Modern Literary Arabic

Islam Al-Momani, Ph. D.

Abstract

This paper aims at finding how "Case-Assignment" is tackled under the notion "Government" in Arabic from the traditional Arab grammarians' grammatical analyses. Its purpose, also, is to argue that case-assignment in Arabic can be assigned under government and thus, this paper adopts the Government and Binding (GB) theory developed in Chomsky (1981, 1982, 1986b) but not Chomsky's "Minimalist theory" (1993 and 1995) because case-assignment is not assigned anymore under the notion "government" but under "Checking theory" in terms of morphological features checking between case assigners and case assignees. Thus, the minimalist theory is excluded here.

The basic part of this article is to argue the views of the traditional Arab grammarians concerning case and government. The paper aims at finding out whether the views of the Arab grammarians are compatible with the recent thinking in linguistics i.e., GB theory or both of these approaches are inadequate for case assignment in Arabic. This paper argues through its data analysis that a number of rules to handle case-assignment are to be proposed.

1. Objectives

The main objective of this paper is to examine case-assignment in Arabic in the light of both: the generative syntactic theory developed by Chomsky -viz, Government and Binding theory and the traditional Arab grammarians. It also throws light on the nature of the word order in Arabic to see whether Arabic is a configurational language i.e. is it restricted to one basic word order i.e., (VSO) or it's a non-configurational language i.e. does it allow elements to move from one place into another? And if yes what is the nature of this movement.

2. Methodology

With a view to pursuing the objectives of this research to a logical end, the researcher has attempted several and complex systems of methodology. The following methods have been applied: historical, descriptive, empirical, comparative, and analytical Historical and descriptive methods have been applied to obtain a historical background and record a descriptive analysis of case- assignment in Arabic.

An empirical method has helped in data analysis and the inclusion of the data (sentences) obtained from personal discussions with a cross-section of native speakers, grammarians, and professors of Arabic language. A comparative method has been applied to analyze case assignment in Arabic and compare it to that found in English to present the similarities and differences between them when necessary. An analytical method has been followed to analyze all relevant data (sentences) from which we have defined the terms exercised the supervision of this research.

3. Hypothesis

The research is designed to analyze the notions: "Government" and "Case Assignment in Arabic" in the light of both: the traditional Arab grammarians and the generative syntactic theory developed by Chomsky, viz, Government and Binding theory. In order to evaluate the explanatory and adequacy of these two approaches, this research is based on whether case-assignment in Arabic is satisfying both views or not. If not, can we explain case-assignment in Arabic with the help of some modifications.

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