Event building, selection and non-canonical Case: fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic

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Thesis

Reference

Event building, selection and non-canonical Case: fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic

PALLOTTINO, Margherita

Abstract

Direct objects of any kind in Tunisian Arabic can be either unmarked or appear preceded by the particle 'fi'. The dissertation describes and analyzes this property of the language in a Generative framework. After a thorough description of the contexts in which the insertion of ‘fi' takes place, the thesis argues in favor of a semantic/syntactic analysis of the phenomenon which attributes to the particle ‘fi' the role of a case licensing prepositions whose insertion takes place in order to prevent a violation of the Case filter. Such a Case salvaging operation is illustrated to take place in contexts whereby uniform temporal binding throughout the event structure is prevented due to the presence of an intervening element endowed with an aspectual property. The analysis highlights the existence of a relation between the Case of a direct object and the temporal constituency of the event it partakes.

PALLOTTINO, Margherita. Event building, selection and non-canonical Case: fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic. Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2020, no. L. 998

DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:148384 URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-1483846

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:148384

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic

Margherita Pallottino

Presented in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of

DOCTEUR EN LINGUISTIQUE

Université de Genève

2020

Scientific committee:

President, Prof. Ur Shlonsky, Université de Genève

Supervisor, Dr. Tabea Ihsane, Université de Genève, Zürich Universität

Supervisor, Prof. Luigi Rizzi, Université de Genève, Università di Siena

Dr. Peter Hallman, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Prof. Jamal Ouhalla, University College Dublin

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In memory of Richard Leo,

an extraordinary friend whose courage, passion and kindness

will always be my source of inspiration.

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Acknowledgments:

My first words are for my supervisors Tabea Ihsane and Luigi Rizzi to thank them for everything that I learned from them over the years and that goes well beyond linguistics.

Tabea is a good at everything she does: she is a good scholar, a good teacher, a good supervisor, a good friend and many other good things. Without her trust I would not have started this dissertation and without her example I would not have finished it. I owe her much more than she thinks.

Luigi taught me how Language is the greatest achievement of our species, an achievement that does not leave anyone behind. It dignifies every human being, not in spite of but because of their origins and abilities. No other scientific enterprise is as human as UG, nor as ambitious or democratic. I thank him for this legacy which gives a higher meaning to the many hours spent working on this dissertation.

I would also like to thank the external members of my commission, Jamal Ouhalla and Peter Hallman. I wrote this dissertation keeping their scientific rigor in mind and doing my best to emulate that. This dissertation benefited greatly from the many discussions I had with Ur Shlonsky around his round table: he reports a number of 56 handouts. Ur’s generous involvement in my research went largely beyond what his role as president of the commission would have required.

Countless Tunisian speakers taught me throughout my years at the Institut Supérieur des Etudes Appliquées en Humanités de Tozeur and in the course of this project, but for her unflagging help a special thanks goes to Intissar Arari: she has been an exceptional student and now she is my favorite teacher. Thanks also to Majid Askri, Belkis Ben Farhat and to the Slimen/Kachradi family.

A very special thought goes to the women in the department of Linguistics at the University of Geneva, a formidable group of people who have been always standing by my side. In alphabetical order and for very different and complementary reasons I thank: Adriana Belletti, Eva Capitao, Paola Merlo, Genoveva Puskas, Manuela Schoenenberger. Their friendship makes me stronger.

There are few working environments which encourage the advancement of an individual in the professional domain as well as in the personal sphere as the Department of Linguistics at Unige. It takes an exemplary synergy of respect and trust for this to happen, plus the right kind of people. For this I gratefully acknowledge Eric Haeberli as the most amazing boss that anyone could wish to have, Christopher Laenzlinger for his kindness and all the junior colleagues for their contagious fervor, especially my postdoc friends Sarah Owayda and Alina Tigau whose friendship is a blessing that arrived at the moment when I needed it the most.

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A sincere “thank you guys!” goes to my office mates in L307: Konan Yannick Romain, Wenli Tang, Katarzyna Kokot-Góra and Richard Zimmerman; they are my colorful extended family.

Valuable feedback on the research in this dissertation was given by: Brenda Laka and the people of Paris VIII, Hagit Borer, Alessandra Giorgi, Pavel Caha, Giuliano Mion, Hamida Demirdache and the participants of the first “Forum for Arabic Linguistics” held at the University of Essex in 2015. The discussion carried out at the workshop on serial verb constructions during the 2019 edition of “Linguistics Prague” had a fundamental impact on my view on the topic; I would like to thank the organizers and all the participants for their comments.

I would also like to thank the outstanding group of scholars who participated in the workshop

“The Syntax of Arabic Varieties” held in Geneva in 2015 which are: Abbas Benmamoun, Nora Boneh, Lina Choueiri, Abdulkader Fassi Fehri, Youssef Haddad, Frederick Hoyt, Usama Soltan, Nisrine Ez-Zahre, plus Sarah, Ur, Jamal and Peter whom I mentioned already. They helped to shape to the ideas which I developed in this dissertation and produced a large portion of the works that inspired me.

I thank my proofreaders Rosemary Shannon and Emily Brinson for their professional attitude and useful comments, and my very last but not least linguistic thanks goes to Mara Frascarelli, who was the first one that made me want to be a linguist: I am one of her girls.

This research was conducted within the project “Selection at the Interfaces” directed by Tabea Ihsane. The project was founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF grant number: 10012_146699).

To conclude, I thank those who have nothing to do with Arabic or Linguistics but have been helping me in the process nonetheless. A felt “thank you!” to my friends in Geneva and ailleurs, especially: Houssein, Aurelie, Gunther, Martina, Doc. Bancila, Rob and Fiore for their advice and perspective over life beyond a PhD.

Then, I would like to thank my family and I will use for them the language of my heart: Mia madre e mio padre mi hanno insegnato che la conoscenza è il fine e non un mezzo, sono loro debitrice per questo e per avermi dato la libertà di essere chi voglio. Mia madre è la persona più coraggiosa che conosca e il suo buon umore e la sua intelligenza sono la mia bussola nella vita.

A mio padre devo la creatività necessaria per immaginare soluzioni ai problemi da risolvere.

Senza di loro questo lavoro non esisterebbe.

Grazie a Zia Roberta, Fede & Simo, Katia, Elena, Nonno Giancarlo e Nonna Daniela: i medici volanti che hanno reso possibile la coesistenza del lavoro e della famiglia nella serenità di tutti. Non ho mai dato per scontata la loro presenza e loro ci sono sempre stati.

Grazie a Giacomo e Letizia per il loro amore e per aver giocato all’ufficio invece dispiacersi di una mamma spesso affaccendata anche nei fine settimana. Siete perfetti. In ultimo grazie a Daniele, il mio amore di sempre, per aver messo un limite al numero di volte in cui è possibile riscrivere una tesi: senza la sua impazienza avrei continuato ancora per qualche anno.

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Glossing abbreviations:

1 First person

2 Second person

3 ABS

Third person Absolutive Case

ACC AP

Accusative Case Antipassive particle

C Complementizer

DAT ERG

Dative Case Ergative Case

F Feminine gender

FUT Future marker

GEN Genitive Case

IMP Imperfective

IMPRV Imperative

IND Indicative

INF INS

Infinitive

Instrumental Case

M Masculine gender

NOM Nominative Case

NON-FIN Non-Finite

PERF Perfective

PL Plural

PROG Progressive

PRTCPL Participle

PST Past

REFL Reflexive pronoun

RELPRO Relative Pronoun

SG Singular

SUBJ Subjunctive

VN Verbal Noun

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يظفاح ىلع كسفن اي سنوت

شيورد دومحم

“I’ve never heard two lovers say thank you, but thank you for how you are

Take care of yourself, o Tunis.”

(Mahmoud Darwish)

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction and aims of the dissertation 1.1.1 fi objects: an overview

The Arabic varieties spoken in the territory corresponding to the country of Tunisia present two types of direct objects: regular DPs and DPs which are preceded by the element fi. Phrases preceded by fi are referred to, in this work, as “fi marked objects” or as “fi objects” or, simply, as

“marked objects”. Marked objects have a similar distribution across the Tunisian dialects, therefore I will treat this phenomenon as a unifying feature of this Arabic variety.

The point of departure of this dissertation is the observation that Tunisian displays fi marked objects in progressive contexts (1)a and that the absence of fi in constructions of this kind causes the sentences to be ungrammatical (1)b.

(1) a. semi qāʕed ydhin fī-dār žirēn-ū Semi prog paint.imp fi-house neighbors-his

‘Semi is painting his neighbors’ house’

b. *semi qāʕed ydhin dār žirēn-ū Semi prog paint.imp house neighbors-his

The main goal of this dissertation is to provide a principled explanation of alternations of this type.

Tunisian is not the only variety which presents fi marked objects. Marked objects are attested across the Arabic speaking countries in North Africa. Ritt-Benmimoun’s (2017) accurate survey mentions previous works that individuated and discussed the same phenomenon in some regions of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan; even though the distribution of marked

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objects is similar but not identical across the various languages. In addition to these facts Ritt- Benmimoun observes that the use of fi in other Arabic varieties is not as extensive as in Tunisian, concluding that the Tunisian territory and its surroundings, meaning the bordering areas of Libya and Algeria, represent the “core region” for the occurrence of this phenomenon.

Evidence from other languages spoken in Algeria and Tunisia brings support to Ritt- Benminoun’s speculation on the geographical diffusion of the phenomenon. Starting with Algeria, Galand (1985) proposes that marked objects are also found in the Berber varieties spoken in the regions of Aures and Kabylie, which are located in the eastern part of the country at the border with Tunisia. Lazard (1989) presents examples of this phenomenon and makes a further connection with the Arabic dialects spoken in Algiers, illustrating that marked objects in Algerian Arabic and Algerian Berber present a similar distribution. The relevant examples are reported in (2) and (3):

(2) rā-ni nākul fī-čina here_is-me eat.imp fi-orange

‘I’m eating an orange.’

(Arabic of Algiers, Lazard 1989, 317: (22))

(3) iččat dg uma-k beat.imp.3.s.m in brother-yours

‘He is beating your brother.’

(Berber of Aures, Lazard 1989, 317: (24))

Sentences (2) and (3) are examples of progressive constructions in Algerian Arabic and Berber respectively; they resemble the Tunisian progressive construct in (1) in that they present objects which are marked. Moreover, the objects in these three sentences are marked by a particle which is homophonous to a locative preposition expressing central coincidence. The element fi, in effect, is used in all Arabic varieties to express location, example (4) illustrates this prepositional use in Tunisian, and the glosses provided by Lazard’s Berber example in (3) illustrates that dg is also translated as ‘in’.

(4) al-ṭanžēra fī-yid-ik the-pot Ø in-hand-your

‘The pot is in your hand.’

(McNeil, 2017, (2))

Marked objects are also found in Tunisian Berber. Brahim (2007) discusses the phenomenon of object marking in both Tunisian Arabic and the Berber dialect spoken in the city of Douiret, situated in the governorate of Tataouine. Brahim systematically presents Tunisian Arabic constructions in which fi marked objects occur next to their Berber equivalent and, once we abstract away from the lexical differences, the resulting picture is strikingly homogeneous and similar to the pattern described by Galand and Lazard. See examples (5) and (6):

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(5) yašrab fī-le-ḥlīb drink.imp fi-the-milk

‘He is drinking milk.’

(Brahim 2007, 95: (3)b)

(6) yessis g-īfku drink.imp in-milk

‘He is drinking milk.’

(Berber of Douiret, Brahim 2007, 95: (2)b)

Tunisian Arabic and Berber examples consistently display the presence of a marked object in correlation with the progressive interpretation; moreover, Brahim illustrates that the Tunisian languages are also similar with respect to the contexts where marked objects do not occur, consider (7) and (8):

(7) yašrab (le-)ḥlīb drink.imp the-milk

‘He drinks milk.’

(Brahim 2007, 95: (3)a)

(8) yessis īfku drink.imp milk

‘He drinks milk.’

(Berber of Douiret, Brahim 2007, 95: (2)a)

This homogeneous distribution shows that this feature is shared by the languages spoken in the core region as a group, irrespective of their genealogy.

Galand (1985: 90) suggests that marked objects must be a relatively recent innovation and I suggest that the nature of the innovation is probably syntactic. The comparison between the extensive diffusion of fi objects in Arabic, they are attested across the North African region and Sudan, and the scattered evidence of marked objects found in Berber (Mion, p.c.) leads to the hypothesis that the borrowing went from Arabic to Berber and not the other way around.

Moreover, the pervasiveness of marked objects in Tunisian and their distinctive obligatory status suggests that the phenomenon spread from Tunisian towards the east and the west.

Finding the reason that induced this innovation in Tunisian is not in the research agenda of this dissertation; however, understanding the underlying mechanism which determines fi insertion in Tunisian is and, in consideration of the facts described above, the analysis of Tunisian may tell us something about the reasons that triggered the change in the other varieties. Consequently, we could consider this research as the departing point of a larger investigation addressing the issue of marked objects in Arabic.

1.1.2 Core issues and questions

The main aim of this research is to explain why Tunisian requires the presence of fi before a direct object. Marked objects occur in progressive contexts, as already discussed in 1.1.1, but also their

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presence can be observed in two other syntactic constructions as well, namely: constructions including two verbs referred to in this work as serial verbs constructions (SVC), exemplified by (9) and constructions which present a stative transitive verb in its causativized perfective form, see (10).

(9) mšet taqra fī-durūs-ha go.perf study.imp fi-lessons-her

‘She went to study her lessons.’

(10) karrhet-ni fī-l-kusksi hate.caus.perf-me fi-the-couscous

‘She made me hate couscous.’

(Brahim 2007, 99: (15)d)

This dissertation investigates the reason why aspectual fi precedes the direct object in these three types of constructions. In order to do so, I will first look at the function that fi plays in the language; successively, I will address the issue of what these constructions have in common in order to explain why fi is required. Thus, I will first explore what fi is and then explain why and where it is inserted, although I am not going to provide a complete description of the contexts where fi occurs in Tunisian, but I will limit the discussion to the three core contexts just mentioned leaving the analysis of the residual contexts where fi occurs to further research.

Several secondary questions branch off the data presented above. In order to understand the common properties of the constructions of the three types, we need to understand what each construction type is like. Hence, starting from progressive construction, I will look at sentences whereby no mark of progressive aspect appears in the sentence, like example (11).

(11) semi yēkl fī-l-kosksi Semi eat.imp fi-house

‘Semi is eating couscous.’

The sentence under discussion is unambiguously understood as describing an ongoing eating event. The comparison with example (12) shows that fi before the direct object is the only indication of the progressive reading in overt syntax; as we can see from the latter example, the presence of an unmarked object patterns with the generic or habitual interpretation in a sentence which minimally differs from the previous one for the absence of fi.

(12) semi yēkl l-kosksi Semi eat.imp the-couscous

‘Semi usually eats couscous.’ or ‘Semi does not object to eating couscous.’

A question that I will address, therefore, is whether fi itself expresses progressive aspect or triggers the progressive interpretation in some indirect way, as proposed by some authors (Kersti, Ghadgoud, and Payne 2016; Ritt-Benmimoun 2017) and whether constructions such as (1) where

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progressive is overtly marked by an independent auxiliary and (11) underlie the same syntactic structure.

SVCs also present several secondary issues. First and foremost, what they are, meaning that constructions of this kind display two verbs, a fact which indicates the presence of a complex underlying structure. Consequently, a nodal point is the understanding of how the two verbs are held together. Are SVCs monoclausal or bi-clausal? Second, not all verbs are serializing, thus, we must single out the signature property which allows some verbs to take another verb as their complement.

Another issue targeted by this research is the interaction between verbal morphology and the presence of fi marked objects. SVCs display a fi marked object if the embedded predicate is morphologically imperfective, whereas SCVs which present two perfective verbs require an unmarked object; compare the example presented in (9) with the sentences in (13)a-b:

(13) a. marwa wṣlet ketbet ktēb Marwa arrive.perf write.perf book

‘Marwa managed to write a book.’

b. *marwa wṣlet ketbet fī-ktēb Marwa arrive.perf write.perf fi-book

The opposite is true with causativized stative predicates which take a marked direct object only in the presence of perfective morphology. See example (14).

(14) le-ktob kif haḏaya yeḥabbebū-nī l-mutālʕa the.books as this make_love.imp-me the-literature

‘Books like this make me love literature.’

The data illustrates that there is a relation between marked objects and verbal morphology and it also shows that this relation is not a direct one. Thus, the problem I will tackle in the course of this work is how we can explain the pattern just illustrated in a principled way.

Last, causativized stative constructions like (10) display that marked and unmarked objects can occur in the same sentence. Thus, Tunisian constructions of this type suggest that accusative Case is not uniformly assigned to all the direct arguments of a sentence and this raises the question of how Case is licensed on a direct object, and imposes the need of a syntactic theory able to account for such a mismatch, namely a split approach to the vP structure.

1.2 The data set

Tunisian is not a standardized language, nor is it an official one; however, the majority of the people in the country, about 11 million, master some dialect of this spoken Arabic variety and use it in their everyday exchanges (Saddour 2009). Tunisian, therefore, cannot be considered a single language, but rather a collection of dialects which share many features among which, crucially, the use of fi marked objects.

Extensive morpho-phonological variation is attested across dialects but little is said in the relevant descriptive literature about syntactic variation. I am unable to evaluate how different the dialects are with respect to their syntactic properties in general; however, I am able to say that fi

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marked objects occur across the Tunisian region because my dataset contains examples with fi marked objects gathered from different regions.

The data set is not homogeneous with respect to the source where the data come from, since it presents both data found in the pre-existing literature and elicited data, nor is it homogeneous with respect to the regional origin of the speakers that produced the elicited data.

Starting with the data taken from the existing literature, I will use in my investigation some of the data published in the following articles: Brahim (2007), McNeil (2017) and Ritt- Benmimoun (2017). Brahim presents data and judgements based on his own native speaker competence, whereas the data presented by McNeil and Ritt-Benmimoun are extracted from their corpora that they created. McNeil’s corpus is based on written sources and is accessible online (www.tunisiya.org), while Ritt-Benmimoun’s one is based on spoken sources and targets specifically the variety of Tunisian spoken in the city of Douz. Additional details on how their corpora were constructed are presented the mentioned articles.

Unless otherwise specified, all the data presented in the dissertation are elicited. For the creation of my dataset I worked with four native speakers of Tunisian, three women and a man, aged between 22 and 40, coming from different regions of the country namely: the capital city of Tounis, Jendouba, Tabaka and a speaker who grew up in the south of the country, between Mednine, Tozeur and the island of Djerba. The four informants have all completed their secondary studies and at least a year of university in Tunisia. They all have received some explicit teaching in linguistics at the university level and they are all fluent in at least another language besides Tunisian, which is either Italian, English, or French. One of these three languages plus Tunisian were used as common language during the interviews.

The interviews took place mostly in Geneva over the course of past 5 years starting in 2015.

The first bulk of data has been gathered with the aid two informants by means of a questionnaire which I administrated. This questionnaire asked the informants to provide grammaticality judgements of a list of sentences modelled on the basis of examples gathered in the preexisting literature. The informants were also asked to provide corrections and explanations whenever they found a sentence which they considered ungrammatical.

The results indicated the presence of a uniform typology of marked objects across Tunisian dialects which convinced me to continue the investigation with speakers coming from different regions. Therefore, in the remainder of the dissertation, I will globally refer to all the dialects as I did so far, meaning that I will refer to all the varieties as “Tunisian” without further specification of speaker’s origin.

Successive interviews were gathered with the aid of a third speaker because one of the two initially involved in the investigation was no longer able to participate in the study. The questionnaires used in this second phase were based on the answers obtained in the previous one.

Since early in 2019, one more speaker joined the investigation. This informant is currently a resident of Tunisia and our exchanges occurred mostly online by means of video-calling tools.

This is the person who helped me with the transcriptions and the transliteration of the examples too. Since there is not a standardized way to transcribe Tunisian into Latin characters, nor a unique pronunciation across the dialects, we transliterated all examples on the basis of her pronunciation and, therefore, on the way she would transliterate them in Latin characters. Importantly, this is only true for the examples that I elicited, meaning that there are occasional discrepancies between

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the way I transliterate some word and the way the same word is transcribed in an example taken from one of the mentioned works.

1.3 Aspects of Tunisian morphology 1.3.1 The pronominal system of Tunisian

This section describes some selected aspects of Tunisian morpho-syntax with the intent to help the reader which is not familiar with Arabic to have a better understanding of the examples and the concepts discussed in this dissertation.

Personal pronouns in Tunisian come in two forms: tonic pronouns and clitic ones. They present gender, number and person agreement features as the table in (15) illustrates.

(15) Personal pronouns in Tunisian (Talmoudi 1980, 144–45)

tonic forms direct object obj. of preposition & possessive

1^st ena -ni -ī/-ya

2^nd inti -k/-ik -k/-ik

3^rd Masc. huwwa -h/-u -h/-u

3^rd Fem. hiyyǝ -he -he

1^st ahna -ne -ne

2^nd ntum -kum -kum

3^rd hum -hum -hum

The data presented in this subsection is taken from Talmoudi’s (1980) grammar of the dialect of Soussa, a coastal city in the north west of the country.

The second feminine and masculine singular person of the tonic pronouns are conflated into one form: inti. For the sake of completeness, I must mention that this conflation occurs in the varieties of Tunisian spoken in the bigger cities in the north of the country (e.g. Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, Monastir) while rural varieties even within the same northern region retain the feminine masculine dichotomy ent/inti. Tonic pronouns can occur as subjects or in direct object position under stressed prosodic conditions:

(16) hiyyǝ ukht-ī she sister-mine

‘She is my sister.’

(17) šuft hiyyǝ fī-l-car see.perf her in-the-car

‘I saw HER on the bus (not, her sister…)’

Given their dependent status, clitic pronouns occur cliticized onto a lexical item whose category may vary. As Table (15) illustrates, with the exclusion of the 1^st singular forms, the same clitics serve a range of uses. They may perform the syntactic function of direct object when the pronoun

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cliticizes onto a transitive predicate, (18) and (19); they can function as possessive pronouns if cliticized onto a nominal head, (20) and (21); and finally they substitute the argument of a preposition as in (22) and (23):

(18) ẓarb-u hit.perf-him

‘He hit him.’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 144)

(19) ra-h see.perf-him

‘He saw him.’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 144)

(20) umm-he mother-her

‘Her mother’

(21) ktēb-u book-his

‘His book’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 145)

(22) maʕ-he with-her

‘with her’

(23) fī-h in-it

‘in it’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 145)

As the pair of examples (18) and (19) illustrate, the two 3^rd person singular variants -h/-u are allomorphs and according to the informant who helped me to unify the transliteration of the examples, their distribution depends on the individual preference of the speaker. The two 1^st person singular clitic pronouns present a form, the pronoun, namely -ni, that only replaces a noun phrase occurring in direct object position (24), and a pair of allomorphs, the forms -ī/-yya, that occur as either a possessive pronoun (25) and (26) or in the complement of a preposition (27) and (28).

(24) šāf-ni see.perf-me

‘He saw me.’

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(25) umm-ī mother-mine

‘My mother’

(26) khu-yya brother-mine

‘My brother’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 146)

(27) amam-ī

in_front_of-me

‘In front of me’

(28) bi-ya with-me

‘With me’

(Talmoudi, 1980: 146)

The distinction between the accusative and the oblique form of the first-person clitic pronoun, i.e.

-nī and -ī/-yya, will become essential in chapter 3 since these forms display the only case distinctions overtly realized in Tunisian.

1.3.2 Templates

Tunisian is a variety of Arabic and, consequently, is a Semitic language. Thus, Tunisian presents the distinctive non-concatenative morphology of this language family. I will not discuss template formation in detail but, because I will refer to this notion in the course of chapter 4, I will introduce some basic aspects of this derivational mechanism. Non-concatenative morphology in very simple terms means that word formation operates not only via the addition of affixes to a root, but it also operates through its internal modification. Semitic morphology, in fact, is said to be non- concatenative because the consonants forming a root, generally three, are not “stringed” together but allow the insertion of different vocalic patterns and affixes within the root boundaries. These patterns of root modification are called templates. Templates may derive nouns, adjectives or verbal forms. The basic meaning of a verbal root, for instance, in Standard Arabic corresponds to a template consisting of a sequence of three syllables CVCVCV in which the consonant positions are filled by the phonemes forming the root, for instance [q][t][l], while the vowel slots are filled with a short middle vowel¹ deriving the form qatala (29)a. Some other examples of derivation via templates taken from Ratcliffe’s (1998) explanation of Standard Arabic morphology, are listed in (29)b-d:

(29) a. qatala “he killed” CaCaCa Basic meaning b. qutila “he was killed” CuCiCa Passive voice c. qattala “he massacred” CaCCala Intensive meaning

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d. qaatil “one who kills” CaaCiC Active Participle of a.

or “killer” (Ratcliffe 1998:24 (2))

Tunisian templates are essentially the same as Standard Arabic. The relations between the root and the basic form of a verb, for instance ‘to write’, or the root and its active participle ‘writer’

are expressed respectively by the templates in (29)a and (29)b, resulting in the forms ktēb and kētib respectively.

Tunisian does not present periphrastic causative forms like the ones found in Romance languages or in English. In this language as in the other Arabic varieties, causation is expressed by putting a root in a specific template, i.e. the form in (29)c resulting in the form kattāb ‘to make someone read’. Modern Arabic grammars generally respect the convention of labelling the templates that derive verbal forms with a number that goes from I to X. The basic form of a verb, here (29)a, is called Form I, while the causative template in (29)c is called Form II. I will not adopt this convention and I will simply refer to verb forms like kattāb as causative forms.

1.3.3 Inflected verbal paradigms

Derivation in Arabic does not only operate via root internal modification, but it also operates via prefixation and suffixation, just as it happens in the Romance language family. This means that φ features on verbs, nouns and adjectives are realized by means of affixes. Tunisian like all other Arabic varieties has two inflected verbal paradigms. Verbs agree with the subject for person, gender and number features; gender and number are not marked on all the forms of the paradigms, whereas person is and the difference between the two paradigms is precisely in the position where person agreement is realized. Generative works on Arabic languages customarily refer to the two paradigms as “perfective” and “imperfective” (for instance, Benmamoun 2000; Aoun, Benmamoun, and Choueiri 2009; Hallman 2015b), I will follow the same convention clarifying that these labels do not precisely reflect the feature endowment of the forms.

Perfective verbs display only perfective morphology. Table (30), adapted from Saddour (2010, 119: table 9), exemplifies the perfective paradigm by presenting the full conjugation of the verb ktib ‘to write’:

(30) Perfective paradigm Suffixes

1^st -t ktib-t

2^nd Masc. -t ktib-t

2^nd Fem. -t(i) ktib-t(i)

3^rd Masc. - ktib

3^rd Fem. -it kitb-it

1^st -nā ktib-nā

2^nd -tū ktib-tū

3^rd -ū kitb-ū

In the other inflected paradigms, namely the morphologically imperfective one, person agreement is expressed by means of prefixes, conversely gender and number features are perfective. Table

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(31) below, adapted also from Saddour (ibid.), exemplifies the imperfective paradigm by presenting again the full conjugation of the verb ktib ‘to write’:

(31) Imperfective paradigm Affixes

1^st n- n-kteb

2^nd Masc. t- t-kteb

2^nd Fem. t- -i t-kteb-i

3^rd Masc. y- y-kteb

3^rd Fem. t- t-ketb

1^st n- -ū n-kteb-ū

2^nd t- -ū t-kteb-ū

3^rd y- -ū y-ktub-ū

Naming the two sets of forms, in fact, is a non-trivial issue that remains a controversial point in the field of Arabic studies. In the literature the two paradigms have more traditionally been labelled on the basis of the interpretation with which they are attributed. Benmamoun (2000) adopts the labels “perfective/imperfective” but does not associate any aspectual or temporal feature to their morphology. Ryding (2005) in her grammar adopts the opposite temporal approach, and refers to the two paradigms respectively as “past tense” and “present tense”. Mixed approaches have also been proposed, as in the case of Comrie (1976) who suggests that the Arabic verbal system combines tense and aspectual properties.

As I will show in chapter 5, the Tunisian available data supports the approach proposed by Hallman (2015b), meaning that perfective verbs express perfective aspect, whereas tense is not necessarily expressed by the verbs that occur in this form. As for the imperfective paradigms, Hallman treats them as default verb forms which are underspecified for both independent temporal features and aspectual ones. This is the view that I adopt as well.

To conclude this subsection a brief explanation of my glossing choices is mandatory. In the remainder of this work I will keep the glossing system as simple as possible in order to focus on the aspects that are relevant for our discussion. For instance, a gloss associated to an inflected verb form will not specify person, gender and number features unless required by the discussion.

In all other contexts I will simply indicate whether a verb occurs in the perfective or in the imperfective form, as done so far and illustrated by examples (32) and (33):

(32) semi dhin zuz dīār fī-žanfie Semi paint.perf two houses fi-January

‘Semi painted two houses in January.’

(33) semi ydhin d-dīār Semi paint.imp the-houses

‘Semi paints houses.’

Tables (30) and (31) respectively show that perfective and imperfective verb forms always convey subject agreement features, in the glosses, however, I will systematically omit this information

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which represents a superfluous level of information in most aspects of the discussion I intend to carry out here. Most sentences will present an overt subject which will allow us to recover the information about subject verb agreement. The reader should nonetheless keep in mind that Tunisian is a pro-drop language and that rich verb agreement allows us to retrieve the φ features associated to pro. Finally, for ease of comparison I will use my own glossing system also for the examples taken from other authors.

Finally, I use the third singular masculine person of the perfective paradigm as citation form as customary. This means that I will cite the Tunisian form ktib as ‘to read’, even though in no context ktib is appropriately translated with the infinitival form of the verb.

1.3.4 Participles and participial sentences

Participles in Tunisian have two forms, active and passive. Active and passive participles are similar to past participles in Romance languages in the sense that their morphology patterns with that of adjectives. Like adjectives, in fact, they present gender and number but not person agreement. See the following table:

(34) Active and passive participles²

Singular ‘to write’ Plural

Active Passive Active Passive

F kētib-a maktūb-a kētb-īn maktūb-īn

M kētib maktūb

Tunisian participles differ from Romance passive participles in that they appear to be the only verbal predicate of a root sentences. In this respect they recall the behavior of ‘benoni’ in Hebrew (Shlonsky 1997) which is a finite verb form with full rights although from the viewpoint of its morphology it is a nominal element.

Participial sentences of this kind receive a variable temporal and aspectual interpretation depending on the aspectual class of the underlying predicate. For instance, participles derived from an activity predicate in Vendler’s (1957) terms receives a present perfect interpretation while directed motion predicates are interpreted in the progressive:

(35) semi šērib kuka barka Semi drink.prtcpl coke only

‘Semi has drunk only coke.’

(36) semi sēig l-adžmal li-l-bir Semi lead.prtcpl the-camels to-the-well

‘Semi is leading the camels to the well.’

The reason for this alternating interpretation has been the object of previous study (Brustad 2000;

Boneh 2010; Hallman 2015a); participial sentences, in fact, do not occur only in Tunisian but represent a well-known construction which to my knowledge spreads across all Arabic varieties.

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Chapter 5 and 6 will deal, among other things, with the syntactic properties of participial sentences in Tunisian.

Going back to the morphology of participles, table (34) presents the full paradigm of a participle derived from Form I of a verb. However, since a root may occur in different forms (i.e.

templates) this same root may derive more than one active and one passive participle. I will not discuss these alternative forms here since it would bring additional complication to a matter that is already complex. Thus, in the remainder of this work I keep the issue simple and limit my examples as much as possible to the participles whose form complies with the pattern presented in (34). Nonetheless, the reader who is interested in Arabic participial morphology can refer to Hallman’s (2016) work; in this work Hallman presents an exhaustive list of all the possible forms in which participles can occur.

1.3.5 The auxiliary kēn/ykūn

Certain temporal, modal and aspectual distinctions are expressed by means of verbal periphrases formed by placing the auxiliary kēn/ykūn ‘to be’, before the lexical verb. The auxiliary, on a par with lexical verbs, presents two inflected forms: perfective and imperfective, see table (37) below:

(37) The auxiliary kēn/ykūn³

Perfective paradigm Imperfective paradigm

1^st kun-t 1^st n-kūn

2^nd Masc. kun-t 2^nd Masc. t-kūn

2^nd Fem. kun-ti 2^nd Fem. t-kūn

3^rd Masc. kēn 3^rd Masc. y-kūn

3^rd Fem. kēn 3^rd Fem. t-kūn

1^st kun-na 1^st n-kūn-u

2^nd kun-tum 2^nd t-kūn-u

3^rd kēn-u 3^rd y-kūn-u

Referring to kēn/ykūn solely as “auxiliary” is not completely accurate since this verb also functions as copula. The perfective forms of this auxiliary occur in copular constructions referring to the past.

(38) semi kēn ġanī Semi aux.perf rich

‘Semi was rich.’

The imperfective forms of the auxiliary, i.e. ykūn and the rest of the forms in the paradigm, do not occur in copular contexts referring to the present since Tunisian like other Arabic varieties require a null copula when the reference is to the present time.

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(39) semi ġanī Semi Ø rich

‘Semi is rich.’

Rather the imperfective form ykūn is used as copula in embedded contexts. For instance, it occurs between the subject and the nominal predicate whenever a copular sentence is embedded under a desiderative verb such as ḥebb ‘to want’:

(40) semi yḥebb ykūn ġanī Semi want.imp aux.imp rich

‘Semi wants to be rich.’

A question that I will touch on in the course of the dissertation is whether kēn is the only auxiliary verb in Tunisian or not. There are two additional verbal elements in Tunisian that contribute to the temporal interpretation of the sentence but not its lexical content: the future marker beš and progressive qāʕed. The two elements are considered to be active participles, though future beš is morphologically invariable and, consequently, it does not display subject agreement.

Under standard analysis auxiliaries merge in the same clause as the main verb and express the main temporal relation. This is also what future beš and progressive qāʕed seem to be doing, hence I treat them as auxiliary although in the course of chapter 5 we will see that they display different properties.

1.3.6 Negation

A sentence in Tunisian is negated by two co-occurring elements: the proclitic element ma- and the enclitic element -š. This complex negation is by no means distinctive of this variety, but it is also attested in other Arabic dialects such as Moroccan, Libyan, Algerian, Palestinian, Yemeni etc. The syntax of the complex negation ma- and -š is very similar in the varieties in which it appears although certain small variations occur in each language.

This conclusive section focuses on the syntax of sentential negation in Tunisian Arabic only.

Negative construction will be used throughout the dissertation as the main diagnostic for verb movement, therefore an introduction to their syntax is mandatory in this introduction.

The complex nature of the negation ma- and -š raises several issues on its syntactic, semantic and morphologic status. A major problem discussed in the literature is how this configuration is derived. As in other languages in which negation is syntactically represented by two superficially distinct elements, the question is whether the two clitics ma- and -š occur: (a) in the specifier and the head of the same syntactic projection, (b) both in the head of the same syntactic projection or (c) in two different negative heads.

In light of the different licensing properties displayed by ma- and -š, I adopt Soltan’s (2014) proposal and assume that negation entails the presence of two distinct projections whose hierarchical order reflects the linear order of the two elements ma- and -š and that the two negative head are each hosted in the head of their own projection. Unlike Soltan, however, I will claim in chapter 6 that the Tunisian data supports an analysis whereby the negative heads occur at different

“heights” in the syntactic structure, i.e. above the TP, between TP and AspP and, once again, between AspP and the vP.

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Tunisian presents two different strategies to negate a sentence. I follow Halila (1992) and call the two alternative strategies “affixal negation” and “independent negation”. According to Halila, affixal negation is derived via verbal movement to a negative projection, landing in an intermediate position between ma- and -š. This movement derives the sequence: ma-V°-š found in the following example (41). The same assumption is also adopted in the present work.

(41) semi ma-qre-š

Semi neg-study.perf-neg

‘Semi did not study.’

If the direct object occurs in the form of a clitic pronoun, the object must move to the NegP along with the verb on which it cliticizes. This means that the pronominal object ends up in-between the two negative elements together with the verbal head, see (42):

(42) semi ma-qar-ū-š

Semi neg-study.perf-it-neg

‘Semi did not study it.’

The same is true for an indirect object when it is realized in the form of a clitic pronoun; example (43) illustrates that the indirect object clitic moves along with the verb and ending up between ma- and -š:

(43) semi ma-kteb-lhe-š

Semi neg-write.perf-her-neg

‘Semi did not write to her.’

When the direct object and the indirect object are not clitic pronouns but full DPs they remain in situ, meaning that they follow the complex formed by the negative particles and the verbal head as illustrated by (44) and (45):

(44) semi ma-qre-š le-ktēb Semi neg-study.perf-neg the-book

‘Semi did not study the book.’

(45) semi ma-kteb-eš l-marwa Semi neg-write.perf-neg to-Marwa

‘Semi did not write to Marwa.’

Not all types of predicates can undergo movement to negation. While perfective predicates always merge with the negative clitic; if the predicate is a participle movement to negation is not allowed, see (46).

(46) a. *semi ma-mēši-š d-dār Semi neg-go.prtcpl-neg the-house

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b. semi ma-hu-š mēši d-dār Semi neg-he-neg go.prtcpl the-house

‘Semi is not going home.’

As example (46) illustrates, a participial predicate is incompatible with affixal negation; therefore, participial sentences must be negated via an alternative strategy that Halila refers to as independent negation. We are not interested in the reasons why such movement is banned, but see Halila (1992) for a possible analysis of the Tunisian facts and Benmamoun (2000) for an approach which includes other Arabic varieties.

Whenever a predicate does not undergo movement to the negative projection, and irrespective of the reason why this movement does not occur, the two negative particles ma- and -š cliticize onto a personal pronoun or onto one another.

The clitic pronoun involved in this construction and the predicate of the sentence agrees with the same subject, sharing person, number and gender features:

(47) marwa ma-he-š tekl fī-l-kosksi Marwa neg-she-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous

‘Marwa is not eating the couscous.’

(48) ma-ne-š neklū fī-l-kosksi neg-we-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous

‘We are not eating the couscous.’

The two negative particles ma- and -š can cliticize onto one-another and form the negation miš. I follow Halila (1992) and assume that miš is not a third type of sentential negation, but rather it is an alternative realization of the “independent” type in which the agreeing clitic has undergone PF deletion. The fact that sentential negation miš can substitute any of the pronominal forms without incurring in a detectable variation in interpretation supports this point. Compare the examples in (49)a-b :

(49) a. semi ma-hu-š yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-him-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous

‘Semi is not eating the couscous.’

b. semi miš yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous

‘Semi is not eating the couscous.’

The choice between independent negation and affixal negation depends on the type of predicate and on the structure of the sentence.

Auxiliary constructions involving kēn or qāʕed show that the theory of minimality (Rizzi 1990) accounts for the syntax of negative sentences in Tunisian. The idea behind Relativized Minimality is that the relationship between a binder X and a bindee Y is blocked if there is a potential binder Z which is closer to X than Y and is of the same type as Y.

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Thus, on the one hand, the negation of a sentence that includes kēn causes movement of the inflected auxiliary because the auxiliary intervenes between negation and the main verb, see (50).

(50) a. semi ma-kēn-š yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-aux.perf-neg eat.imp fi-the-couscous

‘Semi was not eating couscous.’

b. *semi ma-hu-š kēn yēkel fī-l-kosksi Semi neg-he-neg aux.perf eat.imp fi-the-couscous

On the other hand, negation of a progressive sentence which includes qāʕed, i.e. (51), involves independent negation because qāʕed intervenes between the negative head and the main verb but, at the same time, the progressive auxiliary cannot undergo negation due to the fact that it is a participle and participles do not merge with negation, as illustrated previously by example (46).

(51) a. semi miš qāʕed yēkel kosksi Semi neg-neg prog eat.imp couscous

‘Semi did not (use to) eat couscous.’

b. *semi ma-qāʕed-š kēn yekl kosksi Semi neg-he-neg aux.perf eat.imp couscous

Halila (1992) exploits the presence or absence of minimality effects to detect the presence or absence of movement in the syntax and, as we will see in the course of the dissertations I will make extensive use of these diagnostics as well.

1.4 Structure of the dissertation and main claims

The remainder of the dissertation develops as follows: chapter 2 presents the dataset on which the claims made in this dissertation are based, chapter 3 discusses what fi is, chapter 4 develops a theory of accusative Case licensing which is then applied to SVCs and progressive contexts in chapter 5. Chapter 6 takes stock of the research and presents its possible future developments.

Chapter 2 starts off discussing the element fi in Tunisian, its multiple functions and also the contexts where fi as a preposition is not used, namely existential constructions. I refer to the use of fi we are interested in as “aspectual fi” for reasons that will become clear in the course of the analysis. Successively, the chapter illustrates that fi insertion is blind to the semantic role of the direct object, to its interpretative properties and that fi it is not subcategorized for by certain verbs.

This general picture suggests that the insertion of fi is a pure morphosyntactic fact, as suggested by Brahim (2007). The remainder of the second chapter discusses the syntactic environments which are incompatible with the presence of fi marked objects, namely after a perfective verb, after a future verb, in sentences which are interpreted as generic and in various types of non-finite embedded contexts; and the three syntactic environments where the insertion of aspectual fi is possible and/or mandatory, which are progressive sentences, SVCs and sentences whose verb is a causativized stative predicate.

The analysis is developed in the following three chapters, addressing first the issues pertaining to the local domain where aspectual fi is merged, i.e. chapter 3, and then the interplay

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between the properties which determine the insertion of aspectual fi expressed in the vP domain and in the TP domain, in chapter 4 and chapter 5 respectively.

Chapter 3 discusses the element fi and the proposal put forward is that fi is not a particle that encodes aspect of any kind but, rather, is a prepositional element whose function is the licensing of Case on an argument which is not assigned canonical accusative Case. I adopt a cartographic model of syntax and, following Den Dikken (2010), fi is treated as the simplest prepositional structure available in syntax, namely a preposition that projects only the first layer of a preposition’s functional domain. Because of that, on the one hand fi is able to license Case on its argument while, on the other, is not interpreted as the head of a locative phrase. Arguments preceded by aspectual fi, in fact, behave as regular direct objects. The syntactic proposal is that fi is merged above a DP in order to make the nominal phrase self-sufficient with respect to its Case requirements.

Chapter 4 explains why fi insertion happens in Tunisian. The analysis is inspired by a body of work developed by Svenonius in which he addresses the issue of dative/accusative alternation in Icelandic (Svenonius 2002a; 2002b; 2013). He establishes the existence of a correlation between the absence of accusative Case and the aspectual interpretation of the event described by the underlying transitive predicate. The presence of dative objects in Icelandic patterns with complex events whose participants are not described as engaged in the action for the entire duration of the event itself. Ballistic motion verbs, e.g. to shoot, illustrate Svenonius’ theory in the clearest way, because they systematically switch from accusative to dative whenever the direct object describes not the target of the shooting but the projectile. The projectile’s movement is understood in these constructions as extending after the agent ceases to impart kinetic energy to it, hence the agent is understood as no longer participating to the event at the time when the theme is still involved.

I adopt this theory to account for the alternation between canonical unmarked objects and fi marked ones starting first with the issue of causativized stative verbs and their mismatching objects, as in ‘made someone hate something”. The similarity between Tunisian and Icelandic lies in the fact that they present similar temporal interpretations and comparable Case patterns.

The theme of ‘to hate’ in these contexts continues to be hated by the experiencer after the external causer ceases to do whatever they were doing to trigger the hating-state, and the theme is fi marked in Tunisian, like the projectile-theme is licensed with dative case in Icelandic.

I propose to disentangle the interpretative issue from Case licensing, considering them to stem from the same syntactic cause, meaning that the absence of accusative Case is attributed to the presence of an intervening element in syntax that prevents a uniform evaluation of all the event variables contained in a vP, whereas the peculiar interpretation of such predicates depend on the fact that semantics must compute the temporal reference of a sentence which contains one temporal value and two aspectual ones.

I adopt a Klenian approach to the temporal interpretation (Klein 1995) and assume that reference time, which is computed putting in relation an aspectual feature with T°, is the key relation in the licensing of accusative objects. Thus, assuming a neo-davidsonian approach whereby any verbal head projects its own event variable, I propose that a v° whose associated event variable is valued by the aspectual operator responsible for the definition of reference time licenses accusative Case; whereas a v° whose associated event variable cannot be valued by the aspectual operator responsible for the definition of reference time due to the presence of an

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intervening element is defective and does not license any Case. These are the contexts where Tunisian resorts to the insertion of aspectual fi.

Causativized stative verbs become fi inserting contexts when they occur in the perfective form because their vP contains a generic operator which inherently bounds the variable associated to the verbal heads projected by the stative root, as in Chierchia (1995), but not the event variable projected by the causative head. Consequently, a perfective operator in the TP domain binds the highest event variable but not the lowest ones due to the intervention of the lower generic operator resulting in a v° unable to license accusative Case.

The analysis of SVCs and progressive sentences is subsumed under the same theory, although in contexts of this type intervention is claimed to happen across different vPs, in the former case, and within the TP domain in the latter one. Chapter 5 deals with the two contexts in this order. The verbs involved in SVCs are shown to be both lexical; therefore, intervention is attributed to the presence of mismatching aspectual features on the two verbs because the vPs are claimed to share the same TP. I propose that selection enables serialization so that the former V°

is responsible for the selection of verbal complements which display variable complexity. Under this view, fi insertion occurs whenever the higher verb selects a verbal complement whose structure comprises an AspP. The presence of two aspectual heads is the pre-requisite to have two contrasting aspectual values and, consequently, the presence of fi as salvaging mechanism.

One of the findings of this chapter pertains to the nature of the inflectional paradigms in Tunisian. I show how this paradigm can occur in structures of different complexity which vary from a fully blown CP domain, where the imperfectives function as Romance subjunctives, to FinP phrases, gerunds and, possibly, simple vPs. I reached this conclusion by looking at the class of predicates found in serial verbs constructions, and proposed that serialization is a form of restructuring.

The second topic dealt with in chapter 5 is the insertion of aspectual fi in progressive contexts. I follow Arche (2014) who proposes that progressive constructions invariably require the insertion of an additional temporal interval projected directly at the TP level in addition to the interval projected by the event presented in the imperfective. This means that reference time in progressive constructions is always defined by the progressive operator which dominates the imperfective event and, consequently, on the basis of our theory we predict all objects to be always fi marked when they are interpreted in the progressive, as it indeed is. Thus, Arches’ theory applied to the proposal carried out in this dissertation neatly explains why progressive sentences are the prototypical contexts of aspectual fi insertion in accordance with the intuition of my informants.

Chapter 6 presents the conclusions, summarizing the findings and discussing briefly some theoretical issues which I have not solved in the analysis and ends the dissertation addressing two possible paths for future research, meaning a comparative analysis of fi arguments across Arabic varieties and a comparison between aspectual fi insertion and antipassives.

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« Le phénomène que l’on a en arabe et en berbère tunisiens ne saurait être assimilé, comme le fait Lazard (2001, 317) à l’alternance entre zéro et at devant les objets de verbes anglais comme [...] to shoot (I shot a rabbit/I shot at a rabbit « J’ai tué un lapin d’un coup de feu/ J’ai tiré sur un lapin

»). Cette dernière alternance relève plus du lexique que de la grammaire et constitue un phénomène limité à un petit nombre de verbes, alors que l’alternance entre zéro et fi: ou ge est un fait de morphosyntaxe qui concerne tous les verbes d’action conjugués à l’aspect inaccompli.»

(Brahim, 2007, 103-104)

Chapter 2 fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic

2.1. Introduction: object marking in Tunisian

Tunisian displays the systematic insertion of the particle fi [fī] before a DP which appears to be the direct complement of a sentence. This phenomenon can be predicted in at least three distinct syntactic environments, namely: progressive sentences as (1), constructions involving a causativized verb derived from an underlying stative predicate, like (2), and what I named SVCs (Serial Verb Constructions), as in (3):

(1) 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 (2) karrhet-nī fī-l-kusksi

make_hate.perf-me fi-the-couscous

‘She made me hate couscous.’

(Brahim 2007, 99: (15)d)

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(3) marwa mšēt taqra fī-drus-ha Marwa go.perf study.imp fi-lessons-her

‘Marwa went studying her lessons.’

Aspectual fi is also found in sentences that are not of the three types mentioned above. However, for practical reasons this dissertation limits its scope to these core contexts, postponing the investigation of the residual contexts to future research.

These three types of constructions will be described in the course of the chapter, although more space will be given to progressive contexts which, according to the small body of preexisting literature on the topic (Brahim 2007; McNeil 2017; Ritt-Benmimoun 2017), represent the prototypical context for the realization of fi-complements in Tunisian Arabic.

Progressive aspect is expressed in Tunisian by means of a periphrastic construction involving an imperfective verb and the active participle qāʕed, literally ‘sitting, staying’. In this work qāʕed is simply glossed as prog for “progressive” as we see in (1). Whenever qāʕed precedes a verb, the predicate is understood as referring to an ongoing event and, if such a verb is transitive, its direct object must be preceded by aspectual fi; cf. (1)a and (1)b.

The association between progressive aspect and fi insertion is considered somehow prototypical by native speakers too: when explicitly questioned on the contribution provided by fi to the meaning of the sentence, the informants I interviewed consistently reply that fi indicates that a preceding transitive predicate must be understood as ongoing, progressive.

Moreover, the interpretation of a transitive progressive sentence remains unvaried, whether qāʕed is present or not, as long as fi is overtly realized, see example (4):

(4) semi yedhen fī-dār žirēn-ū Semi paint.imp fi-house neighbors-his

‘Semi is painting his neighbors’ house.’

Halila (1992) suggests that this interpretative effect is possible because progressive qāʕed can be optionally dropped at PF. According to his explanation the presence of progressive qāʕed is a matter of pragmatic or stylistic preference, so that a speaker will not produce qāʕed at PF to avoid redundancy in contexts where its functional content can be recuperated from another lexical element in the sentence, namely aspectual fi. In this work I adopt Halila’s PF deletion approach which I will discuss in more detail in the course of the chapter. Consequently, in the reminder of this work, sentences presenting the template:

• imperfective verb – fi – complement DP

are considered structurally and semantically equivalent to sentences where qāʕed is phonologically realized, that is:

• qāʕed – imperfective verb – fi – complement DP

The reminder of this chapter presents the phenomenon of fi insertion by means of a data set consisting of elicited data and data found in the literature. Not all data I am about to present will

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be addressed in the analysis; nonetheless, I included most of it in this chapter to provide the reader with a picture as complete as possible of the phenomena under discussion.

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: section 2.2 illustrates the various uses of the particle fi in Tunisian, illustrating that aspectual fi is homophonous to the preposition fi but must be treated as a separate item. The syntactic interpretative and distributional properties of phrases marked by aspectual fi are discussed in section 2.3, while section 2.4 singles out the contexts in which aspectual fi cannot occur. The following three sections each address a different syntactic context in which the systematic insertion of aspectual fi occurs, namely, section 2.5 focuses on progressive contexts; section 2.6 on serial verb constructions and section 2.7 on causativized stative. Finally, section 2.8 recapitulates the findings of the chapter.

2.2. fi in Tunisian 2.2.1. Locative fi PPs

The item fi occurs in a variety of contexts in Tunisian. Some of the collocations, namely when fi is understood as a locative preposition, are common to all other Arabic varieties; aspectual fi conversely is a geographically restricted phenomenon that has its epicenter precisely in the Tunisian region and its bordering areas. Before launching the discussion on aspectual fi, this section quickly presents the range of collocations besides the aspectual use, in which fi is found or not found in Tunisian.

First, the preposition fi. fi in Tunisian is roughly equivalent to Italian in, French en or English

‘in’. Similarly, to its Italian, French and English equivalents fi expresses in most cases a relation of central coincidence although as we will see in the course of this section there are a number of English prepositions that can be accurately translated by fi. A detailed description of the contexts in which locative fi is used is presented in McNeil (2017). In what follows I will present some of her examples.

First, she proposes that the prototypical meaning of fi is “containment” as in (5).

(5) al-ṭanžēra fī-yid-ik the-pot Ø in-hand-your

‘The pot is in your hand.’

(McNeil, 2017, (2))

As she illustrates ‘containment’ also covers the cases in which the container is not properly encasing the content:

(6) ṯāwla fī-ha mažmūʕa min l-muwaḏḏifīn table in-it group from the-employees

‘A table at which is a group of employees.’

(McNeil, 2017, (7))

Example (6) illustrates that the broad notion of containment can also extend to the cases in which there is no complete physical containment. As McNeil (2017) illustrates by means of the

Event building, selection and non-canonical Case: fi insertion in Tunisian Arabic

Thesis

Reference