Agreement, Pronominal Clitics and Negation in Tamazight Berber: A Unified Analysis

ISBN-13: 9781441101273 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 208 str.

Hamid Ouali

Opis

This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. Work on Berber linguistics from a generative perspective remains in many ways uncharted territory. There has been hardly any published research on this languageand its different dialects, especially in English -- this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations forfurther research.Ouali looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling and Negative Concord. These phenomena have received different analytical treatments, but Ouali proposes that they are all forms of agreement derived under the same Chomskian 'Agree' mechanism. The book addresses a fundamental question in the ongoing debate in recent Minimalism with regard to how subject-verb agreement is obtained and proposes a new analysis of the so-called Anti-Agreement Effect.Itwill be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages.

Spis treści

1. Introduction \ 2. Background on the Berber language \ 3. Agreement: from GB to Minimalism \ 4. Tamazight verb morphology and clause structure \ 5. Subject verb agreement and agreement suppression effects \ 6. Object pronominal clitics \ 7. Clitic doubling \ 8. Negative concord \ 9. Agreement suppression effects and unification via agree \ Conclusion \ Bibliography \ Index