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In:Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI: Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics. New York, 2012
Edited by Reem Khamis and Karen Froud
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 2] 2014
► pp. 47–74

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Prosodic constituency and locality 
in Levantine Arabic

Long-distance negative concord

 | University of New England
Published online: 30 October 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.2.05hoy
This paper examines negative concord sentences in Southern Levantine Arabic (Palestinian and Jordanian), providing evidence that locality restrictions on negative concord licensing are in fact restrictions on prosodic rather than syntactic locality. While negative concord is generally a clause-local dependency, a set of exceptions is examined in which the licensing relationship crosses subordinate clause boundaries. These examples involve a set of subordinating verbs with a high frequency in the Maamouri, Buckwalter, Graff, & Jin (2006a,b) corpus. Acoustic analysis of these data shows a strong correlation between the frequency of a subordinating verb in the corpus, its acceptability with non-local negative concord and reduced prosodic prominence in its pronunciation. This suggests that non-local negative concord licensing correlates with a subordinating verb structure being pronounced as a single prosodic constituent.
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