The Even Yearbook 16 (2024)
#120
volume 16 (2024)
pages 14–31
author Rami Al-Wardat
title Object marking in Jordanian Arabic
DOI http://doi.org/10.57133/evenyrbk.24wa
keywords Jordanian Arabic, object marking, inflectional morphology, tense invariant, grammaticalisation
abstract This paper aims to investigate object marking in Jordanian Arabic (henceforth, JA). Object marking is more distant from the stem than subject marking. The latter is arguably inflectional: it exhibits a sensitivity to tense characteristic of inflectional morphology. Object marking, by contrast, is tense invariant, a property typical of clitics. Together, their peripherality to subject marking and their tense-invariance make a case for object marking in JA involving cliticisation. The argument is based on predictions from binding facts and theories of agreement versus clitic doubling, with evidence drawn from the morphophonological form of the object marker, its lack of interaction with Case, its distribution and grammaticalisation. The paper also examines apparent instances of clitic doubling in JA. In JA, an object clitic can accompany a full DP associate at the right sentence periphery, showing agreement in gender, person, and number. The clitic pronoun may also appear without the full DP. The optionality of using the preposition lə- in JA indicates that JA does not conform to what is known in the literature as Kayne’s Generalization, which specifies that clitic doubling is licit only when an object DP is preceded by a preposition (Anagnostopoulou 2003: 16). The data show that the full coreferring DP requires the preposition lə-, indicating non-doubling while the DP is dislocated. This is reinforced by the possibility of inserting an adverbial between the verb and the PP, consistent with PP dislocation.
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