This study aims at experimentally exploring whether reconstruction can actually be taken as a diagnostic of movement in JA. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1, an acceptability judgment task, investigated the availability of gap and resumption strategies in JA relative clause and wh-interrogative. Experiment 2, combining both forced-choice and acceptability judgment tasks, tested the availability of reconstruction effects in JA relative clauses regarding the type of the binding principles (A, C, and BVA), resumptive pronouns (Weak and Strong RPs), and islands (strong and weak islands). Adopting the same design of Experiment 2, Experiment 3 tested the availability of reconstruction effects in JA wh-interrogatives. The findings reveal that only resumption strategy is available in JA relative clauses. Furthermore, JA relative clauses do not exhibit sensitivity to islands; JA wh-interrogatives do. Reconstruction effects are available in JA relative clauses irrespective of the type of the binding principle, the type of the RP, and the type of the island, whereas the presence of strong islands blocks the availability of reconstruction effects in JA wh-interrogatives. The theoretical implications of these findings unravel that relative clauses in JA are derived via base-generation rather than A’-movement whereby the referentiality of the RP is achieved by binding.

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This study investigates the sensitivity of grammatical resumption to islands in wh-interrogative and relative clause dependencies in Southern Jordanian Arabic (JA). An offline acceptability judgment task and an eye-tracking reading experiment were conducted. The results reveal that resumption in southern JA exhibits sensitivity to strong islands, such as adjunct islands, in both dependencies. The findings also suggest that the southern JA parser posits a resumptive pronoun (RP) inside islands that allow resumption. However, the parser does not predict an RP inside islands that disallow resumption. Furthermore, quantitative data show that wh-interrogative and relative clause dependencies pattern similarly in their sensitivity to islands.

This paper addresses the temporal interpretation in Standard and Jordanian Arabic. Both varieties have two distinctive morphological verbal forms: Perfective and Imperfective, which are grammaticalized forms of Aspect and not Tense. However, they employ direct and indirect linguistic tools to achieve temporal interpretation. The aspectual viewpoints provide pragmatic cues to temporal location of eventualities through their Boundedness properties. In the default case: bounded eventualities are interpreted as past; unbounded ones as present. On the other hand, some pseudo verbs, e.g. 'aSbaHa 'be in the morning' and temporal adverbs, e.g. amsi 'yesterday', introduce temporal interpretation lexically, i.e. by their meanings. The similar contribution of these verbs and adverbs is supported by the similar logical forms of sentences including them analyzed within the NeoDavidsonian Framework.

The current paper presents a Minimalist account of the syntax of tense in Standard Arabic (SA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA). I assume that tense is not morphologically realized, but semantic tense interpretations and independent structural evidence, e.g. Nominative Case on subjects and the availability of expletive subjects, suggests the presence of an independent TP in the clause structure of the varieties at issue. The clause structure of simple tense constructions, e.g. simple past, is monoclausal with one TP; the clause structure of complex tense constructions, e.g. past perfect, is biclausal with two TPs that differ in terms of their categorial feature structure. The matrix TP hosts the interpretable Speech Time feature, whereas the embedded clause hosts the interpretable Reference Time feature. This proposal explains the semantic temporal dependency of the embedded clause on the matrix clause, which in turn derives the complex tense interpretations, and some empirical data that would be otherwise unexplained such as the impossibility for the embedded T head to host the tensed negative particles