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Ordinal numerals in Jordanian Arabic: A morphosyntactic investigation Cover

Ordinal numerals in Jordanian Arabic: A morphosyntactic investigation

Open Access
|Jun 2023

Abstract

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.

Language: English
Page range: 82 - 93
Published on: Jun 28, 2023
Published by: Sciendo
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2023 Mohammad Alhailawani, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.