LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:5 May 2013
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.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Passivization and Theta (T) Role in Arabic and Fulfulde

Aisha Iya Ahmed
Sheriff Abdulkadir

Abstract

This paper intends to discuss how ?-role is assigned to passive structures in Arabic and Fulfulde. Although Arabic and Fulfulde are from different language phyla, Arabic is a Semitic language while Fulfulde is a Niger Congo language. Fulfulde has borrowed many lexical items from Arabic due to the religious affiliation between the two languages. In Fulfulde , ?-role is assigned at D.S that is on active sentence before movement of the arguments to derive the passive structures. In Arabic, both transitive and intransitive verbs take passive forms, while in Fulfulde only transitive verb has passive forms.

1.0 Introduction

This paper intends to discuss how ?-role is assigned to passive structures in Arabic and Fulfulde. ?-role is one of the sub-theories of Government and Binding theory that discusses the semantic relation between lexical items in a sentence. T-roles are assigned to arguments i.e. lexical items in nominal positions. In every sentence, there are two positions in ?-role assignment; an argument position and a non-argument position. Although ?-roles are assigned to argument positions, however not all argument positions are accessible to ?-role. Argument positions that are accessible to ?-role are referred to as A- positions and those that are not accessible to ?-role are A-bar positions. There are two types of arguments with regards to ?-roles; internal and external. The verb assigns ?-role to the internal arguments i.e. the objects because the verb sub-categories the positions occupied by the internal arguments. The verb does not sub-categorize the position occupied by the subject (i.e. the external argument) but it assigns ?-role to it. There are finite universal sets of thematic functions from which every language gets its thematic functions; there are agents, theme, location, goal, beneficiary etc thematic functions. Assignment of ?-roles to arguments is controlled by the ?-criterion.

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

Aisha Iya Ahmed
Department of Languages and Linguistics
University of Maiduguri, Nigeria
Aishaahmed1958@yahoo.com

Sheriff Abdulkadir
Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies
University of Maiduguri, Nigeria
Sharafa123@yahoo.com
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