The case assignment and V-movement in verbal sentence in Arabic syntax : a minimalist approach

Abstract EN

This paper discusses the concept of government and case-system proposed by Traditional Arab Grammarians, (see Haque (1984), Wright (1984) and Abdulhamid (1980)).

They, basically, regarded the system of overt morphological realizations and the transitivity theory but not government as primary factors for it to assign the case of an NP.

As their approach is unable to account for the assignment of the nominative case without a governor, we opt for case-theory of Chomsky (1995) to solve this and other problems.

X-bar syntax as a module of case theory guarantees the assignment of case to a DP in the presence of a case- assignor.

The DP must be governed by specific case – assignor in its maximal projection.

This theory introduces the principle of Exceptional Case Marking as a mechanism that guarantees the assignment of the accusative case by the matrix verb to the subject IP under government.

In this process, we depend on the Spec-head relation to achieve this kind of assignment in X-bar syntax.