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The purpose of this study is to discuss the morphosyntax of ordinal numerals in Jordanian Arabic (JA). I show that ordinal numerals in JA do not belong to a uniform category and argue that they show different syntactic and morphological behaviours depending on their structural position inside the extended nominal projection. In particular, I argue that pre-nominal ordinals are QPs that can merge inside or outside the DP, similar to the quantifier kull (Shlonsky, 1991; Benmamoun, 1999). On the other hand, I show that post-nominal ordinals are adjectives that merge inside the extended nominal projection (Corbett, 2004; Fassi-Fehri, 2018), similar to adnominal adjectives in JA. The findings of this study show that ordinals might belong to distinct syntactic categories within the same language depending on their structural position.

The objective of this work is to conduct a corpus-based diachronic investigation of lexicalization patterns of motion events as well as attention to manner of motion in Arabic narrative writing. Motivated by the scarcity of research on Arabic motion events, this study aims to identify the main linguistic constructions used to express motion events in Arabic novels and more importantly to investigate whether a shift in manner of motion salience has taken place in the last hundred years. The study draws on Talmy’s framework of satellite-framed versus verb-framed typology of languages and makes use of two literary corpora. Main findings include the identification of six major constructions of motion events and show that while novelists in both time periods make use of similar linguistic constructions, there seems to be a significant shift towards more manner salience in contemporary Arabic novels. This increased attention is reflected in less use of the default manner-of-motion verb, walk, in favour of more expressive manner verbs, a stronger tendency to manner modification with walk and non-manner verbs, and a significantly heavier use of non-verbal modifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss the syntax of indefinite DPs in Jordanian Arabic (JA). I argue that in addition to the traditional definite vs indefinite DP split, there exists a third type of DPs headed by the cardinal numeral waaad (one), which functions as an indefinite specific marker when it occurs in prenominal position. I provide several arguments to show that waaad behaves similarly to other indefinite specific markers found in other languages such as English and Modern Hebrew. I put forward an analysis of waaad, where I show that waaad enters the derivation as the head of a classifier phrase, and that it ultimately raises to D. The data and analysis put forward in this paper further support the three-way split between definite, indefinite, and indefinite specific DPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]