Chapter 2: fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic
2.5. fi in progressive contexts
The descriptive literature dealing with the expression of aspect in Tunisian refers consistently to (qāʕed) - fi constructions (cf. example (87)) as the morphosyntactic device for the expression of progressive aspect (Darot 1981; Halila 1992; Mion 2004; Brahim 2007; Saddour 2009; McNeil 2017; Ritt-Benmimoun 2017).
(87) semi (qāʕed) yeqra fī-ders-ū Semi prog study.imp fi-lesson-his
‘Semi is studying his lesson.’
I will adopt their perspective and refer to the sentence in (87) and similar examples as progressive constructions.
The item qāʕed is the active participle of the verb of position qaʕada ‘to sit’. The use of a verb of position in progressive periphrases is not a peculiarity of Tunisian. Similar progressive constructions are attested in many unrelated languages, see Bybee et al.’s (1994: 128) comparative work, as well as in other spoken Arabic varieties (McNeil 2017; Ritt-Benmimoun 2017).
For instance, the use of the participle qāʕed in the voiced variant gāʕid5 is found in Southern
Iraqi and Sudanese progressive constructions:
(88) gāʕid ešrab prog drink.imp
‘I am drinking.’
(Southern Iraqi, McNeil 2017: 25 figure 7, from Agius and Harrak 1987: 165-174) (89) huwa gāʕid yaṭbukh
he prog cook.imp
‘He is cooking.’
(Soudanese McNeil 2017: 25 figure 7, from Agius and Harrak 1987: 165-174)
According to Agius and Harrak (1987, 167-168) the Arabic varieties spoken in south-east Turkey express progressive aspect by means of a mono-morphemic, invariable marker, i.e. ku. As they explain, the marker ku is placed before an imperfective predicate and it derives from the verb qaʕād via morphophonological reduction of the root and a complete loss of agreement morphology.
Tunisian progressive qāʕed, differently from ku, is morphologically complex and it behaves as other active participles since it displays agreement with the subject’s gender/number features.
As we can see in the following examples qāʕed carries a feminine agreement morpheme in (90), in accordance with the feminine subject, and a plural agreement morpheme in (91) in the presence of a plural subject.
(90) marwa qāʕd-a tekl fī-l-kosksi Marwa prog-f eat.imp.f.sn fi-the-couscous
‘Marwa is eating couscous.’
(91) marwa u-semi qāʕd-īn yēklū fī-l-kosksi Marwa and-Semi prog-pl eat.imp.pl fi-the-couscous
‘Marwa and Semi are eating couscous.’
Tunisian similarly to the other Arabic varieties allows the use of participles as the only predicate in a sentence, see for instance Hallman (2015a). Since qāʕed is a fully-fledged participle, it can function as the main verb of a participial root clause (92):
(92) semi qāʕed fī-ṣ-ṣāla
Semi sit.prtcpl in-the-living_room
‘Semi is sitting in the living room.’
Main verb qāʕed selects a locative argument introduced by fi, i.e. locative fi; whereas progressive qāʕed cannot select any argument; as example (93) illustrates, the insertion of a locative prepositional phrase between progressive qāʕed and the following predicate returns a non-grammatical sentence:
(93) *semi qāʕed fī-ṣ-ṣāla yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi prog in-the-living_room eat.imp fi-the-couscous
The above structure can only be rescued if the two verbs are understood as instantiating an asyndetic coordination, meaning a coordination between a sitting event and an eating event. Under this interpretation (93) corresponds to (94):
(94) semi qāʕed fī-ṣ-ṣāla u-yēkel l-kosksi Semi prog in-the-living room and-eat.imp the-couscous
‘Semi is seated in the room and he eats the couscous.’
Progressive qāʕed does not describe a sitting event and it does not contribute any meaning to the sentence besides progressive aspect, in contrast to main qāʕed which conveys clear lexical meaning. Hence, although progressive qāʕed has not gone as far as ku in the grammaticalization process, it appears to have gained a semi-functional status, as also suggested by McNeil (2017).
2.5.2. The interpretation of progressive-fi constructions
Progressive sentences in Tunisian refer to events understood as ongoing at a given “reference”
time, where the reference is understood as in Reichenbach (2005, first published in 1947) as the time from which an event is considered.
Beside this punctual notion of ongoing, Tunisian (qāʕed)…fi sentences can also refer to events understood as ongoing because they are subject to being repeated. I call this interpretation the “contingent habitual” reading. My contingent habits are the equivalent of what Woods et al.
(2002) call in their English grammar “temporary habits” which are expressed in this language by means of progressive constructions like (95):
(95) Mary is getting to work early (lately).
I prefer the term “contingent”, which is defined as “depending on something else in the future in order to happen” (Cambridge English Dictionary) over “temporary” which is defined as “not lasting or permanent” (ibid.), for the following reasons: the label “contingent habituality” refers to a habit which correlates with the duration of a certain state of affair. Thus, as long as this state of affairs holds, from the reference time to any time after that, the habit persists.
Taking for instance example (95): the term temporary does not appropriately describes the fact that Mary’s change of habit, her arriving early to work, may last indefinitely long, maybe as long as the rest of her working life, with no guarantee that she will go back to the previous pattern of arriving late to work. Assuming that there is a new condition in Mary’s life that determined her new habit to arise, and as long as this condition holds, the habit will presumably hold too. Since nothing in (95) suggests that Mary’s new routine will come to a foreseeable end, I believe its aspectual properties should not be qualified as temporary but contingent. In saying this, it should be clear that the distinction I am making is purely in the terminology while the concept Woods at al.(2002) and I refer to is the same.
Notice that Tunisian expresses genericity or dispositionality by means of sentences like (96):
(96) semi yedhen dār žirēn-ū Semi paint.imp house neighbors-his
‘Semi (always) paints his-neighbors’ house.’
The difference between the generic reading of (96) and the contingent habitual discussed above, is best understood looking at the contrast between (97) and (98):
(97) il la-bes be-him yešru fī-diār fī-karṭāž 6 Those good with-them buy.imp fi-houses in Carthage
‘Well-off people are buying houses in Carthage.’
(…due to the favorable market conditions.) (98) il la-bes be-him yešrū diār fī-karṭāž
Those good with-them buy.imp houses in Carthage
‘Well-off people buy houses in Carthage.’
(...surly not farmhands!)
Sentence (97) implies that the habit of buying houses in the expensive neighborhood of Carthage is somewhat recent and concomitant with a certain condition for instance: a variation in the local real estate market. Sentence (98) states that in order to buy a house in an expensive neighborhood such as Carthage it is necessary to have substantial financial means. This statement does not refer to any contingent condition, but it refers to a general truth that does not vary over time.
As the pair of examples under discussion illustrates, the generic reading occurs in the presence of an unmarked direct object (98), while the contingent habitual one occurs in the presence of a fi marked object (97).
The following quote, from Carlson (2012) concisely captures the distinction between genericity and contingent habituality in Tunisian:
“marked habitual requires the presence of regular activity, and another form might be used for those cases, as with rules, functions or dispositions, that do not require regular exercise.” (ibid. p 849)
Carlson’s “Marked habitual[s]” in my understanding correspond to a possible reading of Tunisian (qāʕed)…fi sentences, while all the shades of genericity are obtained in a non-fi assigning sentence in the presence of an imperfective verb.
Contingent habituals require repetition and so do certain generic statements as the one in (98); our encyclopaedic knowledge tells us that expensive estates are bought by wealthy people. This is expected independently of whether we withnessed any such transaction or none at all. Contingent habits, conversely, require “regular exercise”, whereas no such requisite of enacted regularity is presupposed in the generic repeated
6 The original example provided by one of my informants did not include qāʕed. In order to respect this stylistic choice, I have omitted it from the example under the assumption that this is one of the cases in
environment. Generic sentences, in fact, can also be interpreted as dispositional statements which perspicously describe states of affairs that have never been instantiated.
2.5.3. Past progressive and future progressive
Past progressive reference cannot resort to the use of a perfective verb form. This means that it is not possible to place qāʕed before a perfective verb, and that the object of a perfective verb is never marked with fi. As the following example illustrates, verb sequences of this kind are sharply ungrammatical:
(99) *semi (qāʕed) klē fī-l-kosksi Semi prog eat.perf fi-the-couscous
Progressive sentences, however, can indeed be anchored to speech time or to a moment in the past by means of a periphrasis involving the auxiliary kēn ‘be’, (100):
(100) semi kēn (?qāʕed) yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi be.perf prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Semi was eating couscous.’
The omission of qāʕed in sentence (100) is considered preferable from a stylistic perspective.
The use of the auxiliary kēn ‘be’ for the expression of past tense in periphrastic verbal tenses is not a prerogative of progressive constructions. The following generic sentence illustrates that past reference is obtained by inserting the same auxiliary before the lexical verb:
(101) semi kēn yēkel l-kosksi Semi be.perf eat.imp the-couscous
‘Semi used to eat couscous.’
On the basis of this evidence we can assume that past reference is encoded by the perfective auxiliary kēn ‘be’ and, therefore, past progressive is encoded by a sequence of verbs comprising the past auxiliary kēn, before qāʕed which in turns precedes the lexical predicate in the imperfective form and the eventual fi-marked object.
Future reference and progressive qāʕed are incompatible, irrespective of the strategy used to express future time. First, it is not possible to express future progressive reference in a compositional fashion by putting progressive qāʕed and beš together:
(102) a. *semi beš qāʕed yedhen (fī)-dār žirēn-ū Semi fut prog paint.imp fi-home neighbors-his b. *semi qāʕed beš ydhin (fī)-dār žirēn-ū
Semi prog fut paint.imp fi-home neighbors-his
Notice that the presence of aspectual fi or its deletion do not affect the grammaticality of this sentence.
Moreover, differently from English progressive constructions, Tunisian progressive sentences cannot be used to present possible arrangements or future plans. Compare (103) and (104):
(103) Tomorrow Semi is painting his neighbors’ house.
(104) *semi qāʕed yedhen fī-dār žirēn-ū ġuduā Semi prog paint.imp fi-home neighbor-his tomorrow
Thus, progressive sentences are asymmetric with respect to their relationship with time reference.
The language relies on the past auxiliary kēn for the expression of past progressive aspect, while any reference to the future is systematically precluded in progressive sentences, both by means of future beš, or the presence of an adverb.
2.5.4. Negative progressive constructions
As seen in the introductory chapter, sentential negation presents different linear orders: a) a verbal element cliticizes in between the two negative affixes, resulting in the pattern mā-V-š, or b) the verb follows the two negations, and the two negative elements can either cliticize onto one another resulting in the complex negation miš, or they appear cliticized onto a pronoun that expresses coreference with the subject of the sentence resulting in the configuration: mā-pron-š7.
Inflected verbs move to the position in-between two negations, which amounts to saying that it ends up in a position that dominates the negative element -š, whereas participial predicates and nominal predicates do not.
Progressive aspect is marked by means of qāʕed, which is a participle; consequently, qāʕed remains after the negation -š in negative progressive sentences; consider (105)a and compare with the ungrammatical word orders proposed in examples in (105)b-d:
(105) a. semi ma-hu-š (qāʕed) yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-he-neg prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Now Semi is not eating couscous.’
b. *semi ma-qāʕed-š yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-prog-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous c. *semi qāʕed ma-hu-š yēkel fī-l-kosksi
Semi prog neg-he-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous d. *semi ma-yēkel-š qāʕed fī-l-kosksi
Semi neg-eat.imp-neg prog fi-the-couscous
As (105)a-d illustrate, in negative progressive sentences the negation, qāʕed and the lexical predicate are rigidly ordered; qāʕed cannot occur in between the two negative elements (105)b,
7 I follow Halila’s (1992) proposal and assume that miš and mā-pron-š are logically and syntactically equivalent being set apart solely by the deletion of the pronominal element at PF. For practical reasons, I
nor can it precede the negation (105)c, nor can the lexical predicate occur between the two negative elements (105)d crossing over qāʕed.
As said, the morphological properties of qāʕed predict the ungrammatical status of (105)b;
qāʕed, in fact, is a participle and the movement above negation is disallowed. As for (105)d, Halila (ibid. 1.3.1.3) suggests that this is an instance of Relativized Minimality violation (Rizzi 1990) and the same could be said for the remaining case in (105)c, since the imperfective predicate moves across another verb in its participial form.
The ungrammatical status of examples (105)c-d also confirms that qāʕed is best analyzed as a predicate, since minimality restrictions apply to items that share the same features. Additional evidence in support of this point comes from negative past progressive sentences. The following example illustrates that the inflected auxiliary moves, and must move, above the negation in past progressive sentences.
(106) a. semi ma-kēn-š (??qāʕed) yēkel fī-l-kosksi8 Semi neg.be.perf.neg prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Semi was not eating couscous.’
b. *semi ma-hu-š kēn (qāʕed) yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg.he.neg be.perf prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
The above example illustrates that the morphology of a verb is paramount in determining whether a verb can or cannot undergo movement. While minimality considerations explain why inflected verbs cannot cross over progressive qāʕed.
2.5.5. The optional status of the progressive marker qāʕed in (Northern) Tunisian
As already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, direct objects in progressive contexts must be preceded by fi; if aspectual fi is omitted, the resulting sentence is ungrammatical:
(107) a. semi (qāʕed) yedhen fī-dār žirēn-ū Semi prog paint.imp fi-house neighbors-his
‘Semi is painting his neighbors’ house.’
b. *semi (qāʕed) yedhen dār žirēn-ū Semi prog paint.imp house neighbors-his
The obligatory status of fi in (107) contrasts with the optionality of the progressive marker qāʕed, which can be omitted without affecting the interpretative properties of the sentence, cf. (108) below:
(108) semi yedhen fī-dār žirēn-ū Semi paint.imp fi-house neighbors-his
‘Semi is painting his neighbors’ house.’
Halila (1992) explains that sentences (107)a and (108) are semantically equivalent and he accounts for their difference in terms of stylistic variability. As he points out (ibid. p 38), stylistic choices of this type are generally phenomena occurring at PF and instances of deletion such as this should be treated as strategies that a speaker puts into effect in order to avoid redundancy.
According to Halila, therefore, qāʕed is syntactically active in progressive contexts but it can be deleted at PF, because its semantic contribution is contextually retrieved from another lexical item present in the sentence, i.e. aspectual fi.
As discussed by Halila, progressive negative contexts bring solid evidence in support of the claim that qāʕed can be optionally deleted at PF. In the variety of Tunisian discussed by the author, and also in the varieties spoken by some of my informants, progressive sentences disallow movement of the lexical inflected verb above the negation -š, even when qāʕed is not spelled out.
Compare (109)a-b with (110)a-b:
(109) a. semi ma-hu-š yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-he-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Semi is not eating the couscous.’
b. *semi ma-yēkel-š fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-eat.imp-neg fi-the-couscous
(110) a. semi ma-hu-š qāʕed yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-he-neg prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Semi is not eating the couscous.’
b. *semi ma-yēkel-š qāʕed fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-eat.imp-neg prog fi-the-couscous
Under the assumption that the negative particle -š occurs in a syntactic projection above the projection where qāʕed is spelled out, the ungrammatical status of (109)b and (110)b can be explained in terms of minimality: the lexical predicate of a progressive sentence cannot move to negation because every lexical verb in a progressive sentence is embedded under qāʕed, whether or not realized at PF.
In light of this evidence, Halila concludes that the omission of qāʕed must occur at the interface with phonology9, rather than at a deeper structural level which would affect all the levels
9 This claim is not valid for all the dialects spoken in Tunisian. The southern variety described by Ritt-Benmimoun (2017) allows optional movement to NegP also in progressive contexts contrary to what is attested in the variety which is spoken in the capital Tunis. See for instance the following example which is taken from her work (ibid. p. 22).
(b) mā-nitkayyaf-š fi-l-gāru not.smoke.imp.not fi-the-cigarettes
of the computation. I adopt this proposal and assume that (109)a and (110)a underlie the same syntactic structure and, therefore, they should be jointly represented as (111):
(111) semi ma-hu-š (qāʕed) yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-he-neg prog eat.imp fi-the-couscous
‘Semi is not eating the couscous.’
In addition to his argument I would like to produce additional data in support of the analysis proposed in this section. Let us consider negated generic sentences. In constructions of this kind neither aspectual fi, nor qāʕed occur. Halila’s approach predicts that an inflected verb must move above negation in generic sentences given the absence of qāʕed. As example (112) illustrates, the prediction is borne out since generic negative sentences require verb movement above negation:
(112) a. semi ma-yēkel-š kosksi Semi neg-eat.imp-neg couscous
‘Semi does not eat couscous.’
b. *semi ma-hu-š yēkel kosksi Semi neg-he-neg eat.imp couscous
Example (112) shows that an inflected verb undergoes mandatory movement to negation in negative generic sentences, which is expected under the hypothesis that verb movement must occur unless locally banned in syntax, as it happens in progressive sentences.
Finally, one last element in support of the analysis comes from progressive negative sentences involving a verb of motion. Sentences like (113) are ambiguous between the generic and the progressive interpretation, see the glosses:
(113) semi yemšī Semi go/walk.imp
a. ‘Semi is going/walking.’ (progressive)
b. ‘Semi goes/walks.’ (generic/dispositional)
The ambiguity displayed by (113) is expected under the hypothesis that progressive sentences are optionally marked by qāʕed at PF. The interpretation in a. is derived from (114) after the deletion of qāʕed, whereas the interpretation in b. derives from an underlying generic structure.
(114) semi qāʕed yemšī semi prog go/walk.imp
‘Semi is going/walking.’
In this example the lexical predicate moves to NegP also in the presence of a fi marked object. I will not
The proposal supported in this section predicts the negation of (113) not to display the same ambiguity and, as examples (115) and (116) illustrate, the prediction is borne out since each negation strategy conveys one interpretation only:
(115) semi mā-yemšī-š Semi go/walk.imp
‘Semi does not go, does not walk.’ (generic/dispositional) (116) semi miš yemšī
Semi neg-neg go/walk.imp
‘Semi is not going/walking.’ (progressive)
Example (115) requires verb movement to negation. This is expected under the idea that generic sentences require a simple tense, i.e. an inflected verb form. Progressive constructions, conversely, are periphrastic and require the presence of qāʕed; therefore, they do not display verbal movement to negation.
2.5.6. Recap
Progressive aspect is expressed by means of a participial predicate, namely qāʕed. This is the active participle of the posture verb ‘to sit’ and can also be used as a main predicate. Lexical
Progressive aspect is expressed by means of a participial predicate, namely qāʕed. This is the active participle of the posture verb ‘to sit’ and can also be used as a main predicate. Lexical