S-Group: Ali Alzayid

Next week’s S-Group meeting features Ali Alzayid. The group meets Friday from noon to 1pm in the department conference room (Curtin 535).

Title: The Syntax of Sentential Negation in the Abha Arabic Dialect

Abstract: In this paper, I investigate sentential negation of Abha Arabic dialect. It is a dialectal variation of Arabic spoken in the southwest of Saudi Arabia in the Asi:r region. To my knowledge, Al-Azragi (1998) was the first researcher to examine the syntax of the Abha dialect. Based on her data, I argue that AAD has four negation particles: m, la:, lim, and lis. Following many works adopting what is known as the “NegP Hypothesis,” I assume that negative particles in AAD head their own functional projections. Moreover, the analyses of Benmamoun of Arabic functional categories (2000) is adopted with slight modification to account for the data in question.