Free State Constructions

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate Free State (FS) in Hijazi Arabic. This structure is not used in Modern Standard Arabic. It was introduced into the Arabic dialects later on as a competing structure to the Construct State (CS). First, we discuss the characteristics of this structure in comparison to its counterpart: the CS. we show that semantically FS can express only three semantic relations out of the five semantic relations CS can convey. Furthermore, the paper shows that the FS genitive exponent in HA "ħagg" agrees with the head noun of the matrix DP in phi-features. The discussion then shifts to the origin of the genitive exponent ħagg. The paper argues that it is originally a noun that has acquired a new meaning: an anaphor that means something like "one of". Hence, we gloss ħagg as ANAPH. Contrary to previous analyses for the FS genitive exponent, the paper proposes that ħagg, the noun, heads its own CS and it is linked to the preceding DP by a binding relationship, which involves feature agreement in gender and number. Consequently, we propose that ħagg-headed CS has the same structure of the nominal CS. Finally, we investigate the occurrence of both FS and CS structures in HA and show when one structure is preferred to the other.