Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic: A Comparison of TAG and CCG Analyses

This paper discusses interactions between negative concord and restructuring/clause union in Palestinian Arabic. Analyses formulated in Tree Adjoining Grammar and Combinatorial Categorial Grammar are compared, with the conclusion that a perspicuous analysis of the the intricacies of the data requires aspects of both formalisms; in particular, the TAG notion of the extended domain of locality and the CCG notion of flexible constituency. 1 Palestinian Arabic Negative Concord In Palestinian Arabic (PA), negative concord occurs with the determiner wEla “(not) even one,” where negative concord describes the failure of an expression which expresses negation in some sentences to do so in others. “wEla-phrases” are interpreted either as negative quantifiers (“NQ-wEla)” or as polarity-sensitive indefinites (“NPI-wEla”). The NQ-interpretation is available preceding the finite verb or verb complex in a clause (1-2) or in fragment answers (3-4): (1) wEla not.even nıtfıt bit anu:Ta femininity Qınd-ık. at-you(fs) “You don’t have the least bit of femininity!” (2) wEla not.even yo:m day Qaǧabni pleased.3ms-me l-Ekıl. the-food “There wasn’t even one day the food pleased me!” (3) Q: šu what k ̇ al-l-ak? said.3ms-to-you A: wEla not.even iši. thing “What did he say to you? Nothing at all.” (4) Q: mi:n who šUfti? saw.2fs A: wEla not.even s ̇ u:s ̇ chick ıbn son yome:n. two-days “Who did you see? Not even a two-day old chick!” A preverbal wEla-phrase preceding a sentential negation marker causes the sentence to have a double-negation reading (5: compare with 2): (5) wEla not.even yo:m day ma-Qaǧabni not-pleased.3ms-me l-Ekıl. the-food “There wasn’t one day the food didn’t please me!” NQ-wEla never occurs within the scope of negation but does occur in post-verbal positions which are not thematically entailed by the verb (6-7): (6) huwwa he wEla not.even iši! thing