Negation in Turaif Arabic: Not the last word.
This study describes a wide range of syntactic aspects of negation in Turaif Arabic (TA), a spoken variety of Saudi Arabia, with some comparison with other varieties, and develops an approach to the syntactic analysis of core aspects of negation in TA within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The main focus of this study is on the syntax of sentential and constituent negation, negative coordination, and negative sensitive items. I additionally deal with issues related to neg raising predicates and universal quantification. Building on previous syntactic accounts of negation in LFG, I treat sentential negative particles mā and lā as non-projecting words occurring under the Neg-hat category as sisters of the verbal predicate at the terminal node level and associated with a feature ENEG + in the f-structure. The negative form mū and its inflected negative forms are treated as fully projecting word-forms under the I node, given their function as a negative copula that also expresses the present tense. It is the alternation with inflecting counterparts that signals the negative copula form, as opposed to the presence of invariant mū/mahu, which signals constituent negation. Negative coordination in Arabic is analysed in LFG for the first time, focusing particularly on the emphatic negative coordination construction expressed through lā . . . wala . . . both when coordination of sentence predicates (verbal and non-verbal) is involved, and in the coordination of arguments/dependents. A non-flat c-structure schema is proposed, along with the appropriate lexical entries for lā and wala. In the f-structure, use is made of three features: ENEG + for sentence/main predicate negation, CNEG + for constituent negation, and NC + for negative concord. In the discussion of negative sensitive items, it is shown how negative concord items and negative polarity items differ in TA only on the simple criterion of occurrence as a negative fragment response to a question. In other respects, each constitutes a heterogeneous category, for example with respect to its occurrence or not, within non-veridical as well as anti-veridical contexts.
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