The syntax of Wh-interrogatives in Buhairi Arabic : documentation and analysis

Abstract EN

The current article documents new empirical data on the syntactic behaviors of wh-interrogatives in Buhairi Arabic (BA), an under-researched dialect spoken in the southwestern part of Saudi Arabia.

Like Lebanese and Najdi Arabic (Aoun et al., 2009; Albaty, 2013), BA employs four strategies in wh-formation (i) gap, (ii) resumptive, (iii) Class II resumptive and (iiiv) in-situ.

In contrast to other Arabic dialects, BA employs a new mechanism in wh-questions, which I term, Class II gap strategy.

In this paper, I highlight the hallmarks of all the strategies in operation, comparing them with parallel constructions in Arabic grammar.

I examine the internal morpho-syntax of wh-words and provide a separate syntactic analysis for each strategy, after a unified account could not be warranted.

Although the gap strategy is derived via the canonical whmovement, the resumptive strategy is accounted for via a base-generation approach.

As for Class II resumptive and Class II gap strategies, Shlonsky’s (2002) treatment of reduced cleft wh-interrogatives in Palestinian Arabic proves efficient in accommodating all the peculiarities found in the same constructions in BA.

Finally, and despite the recent support of the unselective binding proposal for wh-in-situ (Pesetsky, 1987; Aoun & Li, 1993; Mathieu, 1999; Bruening & Tran, 2006; Abdel Razaq, 2011; Albaty, 2013 inter alia), BA provides data that rather advocates the covert LF-movement analysis (Huang, 1982, 1995; Lasnik & Saito, 1992).