In favour of SizeP in DP: Evidence from diminutives in Jordanian Arabic

• Mohammad Alhailawani ^[2] ; Osama Abdel-Ghafer ^[1]
  1. [1] Jordan University of Science and Technology

     Jordan University of Science and Technology

     Jordania

     
  2. [2] University of Petra
• Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 35, Nº. 2, 2023, págs. 3-32
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper reports on the syntactic distribution of the diminutive morpheme -ay in Jordanian Arabic and its implications for the structure of count DPs. Two theoretical issues are addressed in this paper. First, we investigate whether the diminutive morpheme in Jordanian Arabic is derivational or inflectional. Second, we examine if the morpheme is introduced in the DP structure as a head of its own projection, or if it is simply an adjoined modifier. We show, through different tests, that the Jordanian Arabic diminutive behaves as an inflectional morpheme that realizes its own head Size0 in the functional domain of the DP (De Belder 2011). We also discuss the interplay between the diminutive morpheme on one hand, and the singulative and plural morphemes on the other hand. We show that the interaction between these morphemes yields different interpretive effects concerning the kind vs unit distinction inside count DPs. The picture that emerges from the discussion presented in this paper is a unified analysis of count DPs in Jordanian Arabic.