The Arabic quantifier "kull"

• Authors: Osama Abdel-Ghafer
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper seeks to analyze the internal structure of "kull" structures and hence the asymmetries that arise in the context of such structures in Modern Standard Arabic. It is argued that "kull"-initial and "kull"-final are derivationally unrelated. Drawing on a number of structural asymmetries, the quantifier is argued to project into a quantifier phrase which is merged inside a determiner phrase. The difference between quantifier-initial and quantifier-final structures relates to the position where the quantifier phrase is merged. In quantifier-initial structures, the quantifier phrase is argued to be merged as the complement of the determiner while in quantifier-final structures, the quantifier phrase is argued to be adjoined to DP. Within this context, syntactic as well as semantic conse-quences result from the initial merge of the quantifier phrase.

Keywords

EN

quantifier; nominal expressions; Merge; scope ambiguity; word order

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 177-201

Dates

received

2013-01-10

revised

2013-12-02

accepted

2013-12-07

online

2015-06-30

Contributors

author

Osama Abdel-Ghafer

• Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2015-0007