Coordinate deletion in Arabic

Abstract EN

Oirsouw,1 following proposals advanced by Tai2 and Koutsoudas,3 argues for a unitary approach to deletion under identity in coordinated structures.

Instead of having three separate deletion rules, namely, Gapping, Coordination Reduction and Right-Node Raising, he opts for one general rule which simply states, “Delete under identity in coordinated structures.” The main concern of this paper is twofold: first, coordinate deletion in Arabic will be presented, investigated and discussed; second, it will be demonstrated that coordinate deletion in Arabic supports a unitary approach to deletion under identity in coordinated structures.

Nonetheless, it will be shown that Arabic data on coordinate deletion presents a number of problems that have to be solved before attempting an adequate unitary framework of deletion pehnomena in coordinated structures, let alone the fact that it is almost impossible to formalize such a unitary deletion rule.