Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

This paper explores the morphosyntactic properties of the sentential negation in Rural Palestinian Arabic (RPA) and how it is related to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) morphosyntax. The study shows that the negative markers ma: and – iš are used to negate perfective and imperfective verbs, while muš is a head element where the negative precedes non-verbal predicates such as adjectives, prepositional phrases (PP) and participles. The main predicate in negative phrase does not need the noun phrase (NP) to raise to T if there is no need to merge with the negative element. The study also investigates the differences between RPA and Urban Palestinian Arabic (UPA). The main difference is that the use of –iš as a post verbal clitic in both perfective and imperfective tense is more common in the Rural dialect.