The Syntax and Semantics of Arabic Possession

Abstract

This dissertation is about the constituents that build possession sentences and the elements that compute their semantics. Through a detailed study of clausal possession formation in the Saudi variety of Arabic, this work contributes to a line of research in which possession relations are introduced in a nominal domain and establish a dependency between two nominal arguments. It argues that the domain where this dependency is fulfilled may go beyond the nominal phrase. The major theoretical claim of this work is that syntax is less deterministic of thematic roles; an object may serve as the syntactic argument of a head without being its semantic argument. Thematic roles are treated as parts of the semantic component of grammar. In the present system, the possessor thematic role is saturated in two different places, leading to differences in the range of possession meanings associated with each structure. First, the possessor thematic role may be saturated in the complement of the head that introduces it. This possessive construction is essentially attributive, and deriving clausal possession from this construction involves extracting the possessor from its base position through the DP edge. Second, the possessor thematic role may be saturated in the specifier of a higher expletive head. The present approach fits in the contemporary literature that argues for the multiplicity of structures leading to possession sentences.