Arabic PPs in a Rooted Lexicon

Abstract

We motivate a ‘rooted’ PP shell analysis of Arabic prepositional phrases, which takes into account the prepositional dual life, as a lexical root item and as a vocabulary word, projecting a lexical √P headed by the P root, and a functional pP headed by p, the syntactic case assigner. Moreover, PlaceP and PathP projections are motivated by differentiating locative and directional PPs, and AxPartPs represent the structure of adverbial spatial nouns (đ̣uruuf). It is shown that alternative analyses using a single source (or projection) of PPs are inadequate in dealing with prepositional polysemies, and their morpho-syntactic alternations or variations. A bifurcation analysis instead (distinguishing root syntax from category syntax) is motivated and implemented along the lines of distributive models of word formation, making use of the simplest composition operation Merge in both syntax and the lexicon.