Revisiting the morphosyntactic categorization of modals in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract EN

This paper is mainly concerned with delineating the categorical status of Jordanian Arabic modals.

In this regard, the paper defends an alternative perspective of the conventional „verbal, pseudo-verb and particle‟ view of the morphosyntactic categorization of modals in Arabic in general and in JA in particular.

It is proposed therefore that JA modals laazim‟must‟, mumkin/yemkin „may/might‟ and the modal bigdar „can/could‟ belong to an „open/null category‟ and not to any of these conventional categories.

Furthermore, the paper shows that JA modals exhibit inconsistent and noncoherent morphosyntactic behavior.

Based on this fact, it is concluded that JA modals form quite a heterogeneous rather than homogenous group.

Crosslinguistically, the heterogeneity and the proposed open/null category of JA modals lend further evidence to the difficulty to universally define the category of modals on formal grounds (Machova, 2013).