Modern Standard Arabic

On Monday, February 9, 2015, Dr. Muteb Al Qarni talked about the morphosyntax of Numeral-Noun Constructions (NNC) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in a seminar organized by the Language Research Centre. Dr. Al Qarni's presentation was centered Numeral-Noun Constructions (NNC) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). He emphasized that the lexical categorization of Arabic numerals provide insights into their syntactic structures and accounts for their inflectional patterns in terms of position, agreement, case, and (in) definiteness. He related that Arabic numerals do not belong to a uniform lexical category. Rather, each class of numerals belongs to a different category: 1-2 are adjectives, 100/0, 200/0 and 20-90 are nouns, and 3-10 are quantifiers. He, while talking about his dissertation, also discussed the gender polarity in 3-10 and proposed that 3-10 are inherently feminine and their feminine feature is deleted in the presence of a feminine counted noun due to OCP effect. As for case, it was proposed that all numerals assign genitive to the counted noun. However, 20-90 differ in that genitive defaults to accusative by an impoverishment rule. The presentation was worthwhile and in-depth. For further questions and comments please email MutebAlqarni@gmail.com Date: Spring 2015 Source: FLT Web Team