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Negation in Heritage Arabic Grammars
by Elabbas Benmamoun and Abdulkafi Albirini
In this paper, we discuss the morphosyntax of negation in heritage Arabic grammars based on two on-going studies. In the first experiment, we focus on the syntax of heritage Egyptian Arabic and in the second experiment we focus on third language acquisition and specifically the interaction between heritage colloquial Arabic and Standard Arabic.
In the first study, we compare the sentential negation system of Egyptian heritage speakers to that of their native counterparts. Egyptian Arabic involves the use of non-discontinuous (miš/muš) and discontinuous negation (ma—š) forms which vary in terms of acquisition age and morphosyntactic complexity. Five oral production tasks were used to examine the participants’ negation patterns in verbal sentences (present, past, future, and imperative) and verbless sentences (nominal, adjectival, prepositional predicates and existential constructions). The results indicate that heritage speakers prefer the non-discontinuous negative even in contexts where the discontinuous negative is preferred. The theoretical consensus (Shlonsky 1997, Benmamoun 2000, Soltan 2007) is that discontinuous negation is due to verb movement to negation. Assuming this to be the case, we take the preference for this pattern to be due to incomplete acquisition or attrition of the syntax of verb movement and its interaction with negation. Movement operations usually create dependencies at a distance, a syntactic property that seems to be vulnerable in heritage grammars as research on Case and agreement has shown (see for example Polinsky 2011, Montrul 2008).
In the second study, we focused on sentential negation in Standard Arabic (SA). Using the same tasks, this experiment aimed to uncover the role of heritage colloquial Arabic in the acquisition of Standard Arabic, a language that is in diglossic relation with colloquial Arabic and is the language that many Arabic heritage speakers learn as second or third language ( Benmamoun et al. In press, Albirini 2013, Albirini and Benmamoun 2012).
References
Albirini, A. (2013). Toward understanding the variability in the language proficiencies of Arabic
heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Albirini, A. & Benmamoun, E. (2012). Aspects of second language transfer in the oral production of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Benmamoun, E., Albirini, A., Montrul, S. and Saadah, E. (in press). Arabic Plurals and Root and Pattern Morphology in Palestinian and Egyptian Heritage Speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Benmamoun, E. (2000). The Feature Structure of Functional Categories. New York: Oxford
Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Polinsky, M. (2011). Reanalysis in adult heritage language: A case for attrition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(2), 1-45.
Shlonsky, U. (1997).Clause structure and word order in Hebrew and Arabic: An essay in comparative Semitic syntax. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soltan, U. 2007. On formal feature licensing in minimalism: Aspects of standard Arabic morphosyntax. PhD dissertation. University of Maryland.