The grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs in Najdi Arabic : a syntactic and DM account

Abstract EN

The present paper investigates grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs in Najdi Arabic.

Different from what has been proposed in the literature that grammaticalization is taken to be a diachronic process, we argue that grammaticalization is a purely instant syntactic operation.

The idea is that, grammatical items are basically generated by encoding -categorizing- their Roots √XXX as auxiliary, "functional", verbs in order to be able to express grammatical functions (i.e.

Tense and Aspect).

If, by contrast, the Root √XXX is intended to be used as a lexical item, it is encoded -categorized- by a category-assigning head to appear as a lexical item (i.e.

main verbs in the current paper).

The operation utilizes a combination of syntax proper and distributed-morphology processes.