Copulae and Classifiers in the Arabic Noun Phrase

This thesis proposes a reconsideration of the Arabic adnominal markers and of its modification structure, on the ground that the current analytical trend, which likens them to their Indo-european counterparts, runs into several problems. It develops an unified account of the adnominal markers, and argues that all of them are to be understood as copulae recursively embedded into the Arabic modification structure. Modifiers too are interpreted here in an unified way, all of them being rethought of as a non-restrictive relative clause, at least originally. Among the consequences of this approach are reinterpreting nunation as a Numeral Classifier and the prenominal article as a medial article. As for case-endings, the present dissertation revives the Semitistic hypothesis that underlying to them is a morpheme w and proposes to identify it with the Conjunction w ‘and’ widespread in Arabic and Semitic, since this kind of conjunction crosslinguistically (e.g. in English, Somali) mediates the predicational relationship between the NP / Subject and the non-restrictive relative clause / Predicate. Moreover, it is argued here that Arabic case is actually a semantic opposition Subject vs. Non-subject that develops out of a copular opposition between lack vs. presence of Predicate Inversion. The copula analysis of the Arabic modification structure has also some interesting implications for linguistic theory in general, because it provides a definition of word as well as a better understanding of the fusive, agglutinating and isolating morphological types. This thesis capitalizes on the findings of some recent threads of research. On diachronic level, it adopts Owens’s theory about Arabic dialects and Classical Arabic, according to which the former are older than the latter, as well as Garbini’s and Durand’s view that Arabic is a mixed language made up of an Amorite and a Pre-semitic parastrate. In synchrony, it follows Moro’s theory of Dynamic Antisymmetry, which explains the displacement phenomenon typical of natural languages as a consequence of another key-property of them, namely Saussurean linearity.