SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study is concerned with the syntactic order of adverbials in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. The thesis reviews previous treatments of the adverb both in Arabic and English and investigates a consistent body of data from a particular type of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and specifically from female usage which differs in some respects from that of men. Previous treatments were mainly structural of the Bloomfieldian type or Transformational-Generative following the work of Noam Chomsky. Treatment of the adverb within the latter framework has undergone various changes throughout the years mainly centering around the place of generation of the Adverb within the tree of any particular sentence and also around the actual identification of certain strings as adverbial. The position taken in this study is that the adverb is any element of the sentence other than the obligatory major constituents, namely the subject and the predicate. Adverbs are thus optional or structurally disposable constituents, which may be deleted without affecting grammaticality. It is hypothesized that the distinct problems that adverbials pose for the analyst lie in the relative distributional freedom they enjoy in the sentence. Semantic considerations as well as that of the usage of certain adverbials are examined in order to explain the syntactic behaviour of adverbials where necessary. After discussing different views held towards the adverbial category, a classification system is suggested. It was found that adverbials are best classified on the grounds of position and function. In chapter 4, a thorough examination of their modifying function is presented followed by an examination of their sentence position and the effect of this on sentence acceptability.