A Focus Transformation of Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

latter case by a focus transformation which duplicates a noun before the verb and leaves the initial instance of the noun after the verb to be pronominalized. This pronominalization, in the case of subject nouns, is realized as the so-called number inflection of the verb. Such a treatment also simplifies the analysis of relative clauses, ostensibly subjectless sentences, and sentences containing copula pronouns. One of the major advantages of transformational-generative grammar is that it reveals underlying regularities in superficially unrelated sentence structures. In this paper we shall consider two major Arabic sentence types and show that they are but different manifestations of a single deep structure.