Licensing : movement and feature checking in standard Arabic and minimalism

Abstract EN

his paper attempts to explore the Theory of Feature Checking in Minimalism and show how it works in the morpho-syntactic analysis of Standard Arabic.

It examines how Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist distinctions among features (such as, categorical features, Case-features and phi-features) function in Standard Arabic and English and points out the differences between both languages in terms of [± Interpretable].

Besides, it tries to point out the parametric differences between Standard Arabic and English on the basis of the strength/weakness of their TNS and AGR features.

It also illustrates how features of the verb and the subject NP in Standard Arabic are checked in overt/covert syntax.