Case syncretism in Arabic : a nanosyntactic approach

Abstract EN

Case syncretism refers to the co-occurrence of two cases spelled out by one morpheme.

the present study attempts to shed lights on this phenomenon by describing Arabic data which received little attention in the literature.

Arabic nouns inflect for three cases : nominative, accusative and genitive.

these cases show two patterns of syncretism : accidental and non-accidental.

the former is assumed to be caused by phonological processes while the latter is universal.

the adopted approach (nanosyntax) assumes that syncretism is universal and systematic.

it is governed by specific case sequence and adjacency condition.

Caha (2009) developed a decompositional model which analyses case into atomic features and submorphemic components.

furthermore, a fundamental difference is made between synthetic and analytic case.

the former refers to morphological case while the latter refers the use of preposition to express un grammaticalised cases.

the study shows that Arabic exhibits two types of syncretism : accidental and non-accidental.

accidental syncretism occurs in Arabic due to phonological aspects.

the defective nouns are not marked for case because they end with a vowel.

thus, they show of non-adjacent cases.

non-accidental syncretism occurs in dual, masculine plural, and feminine plural.

singular nouns do not show any type of syncretism.