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Syntactic Innovation in Cairene Arabic: The Case of the Unaccusative Constructions".

Research Date
Research Department
Research Authors
ِProf. Abdelgawad T. Mahmoud
Research Journal
Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference Organized by Rayzan state University , Russia on " Language and Communication Through Culture "
Research Publisher
Rayzan state University
Research Abstract

 

    

The main contribution of this paper is to explore an on-going syntactic change in Cairene Arabic (CA) which is relevant to the Unaccusative Hypothesis  (UH) proposed by Perlmutter. According to this hypothesis, intransitive verbs do not constitute a homogenous class. Rather, they are categorized into the unergative class and the unaccusative class. Based on the analysis of  a sufficient amount of CA data, this paper provides evidence that CA unaccusatives are undergoing a syntactic change via two mechanisms: morphological simplification and loss of morphological marking. The findings of this paper are consistent with  general linguistic univesals wherey languages are more likely to develop tendency towards simplification.