Privileged Syntactic Argument and Discourse-Pragmatics in Arabic

Abbas Talib Abdul-Zahra

Abbas Talib Abdul-Zahra Department of English Language, College of Education, University of Kufa

Keywords: Role and Reference Grammar, Privileged Syntactic Argument, Discourse-Pragmatics, Arabic

Abstract

Privileged syntactic argument (PSA henceforth) is a concept postulated by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG henceforth) to substitute the traditional notion of subject. It constitutes the only grammatical relation within the RRG theory which claims that PSA is construction specific. PSA is defined as syntactic restrictions on NPs and PPs (arguments and non-arguments) that can trigger agreement and supply the interpretation for missing argument. RRG differs from other approaches in this respect in that it denies the existence of grammatical relations while maintains that PSA is the only universal relation that has solid evidence. Moreover, it is a grammatical that is affected by discourse-pragmatic factors such as topicality, prominence and focus.Arabic is among the languages that has not been studied through this typological perspective. Thus, there is a paucity in the literature concerning the types of PSA and criteria of PSA selection in Arabic.The results show that Arabic treats the actor of transitive verb, subject of intransitive verb and derived subject of passive alike. Besides, PSA in Arabic is not necessarily a macro-role, i.e. non-macro-role arguments can be PSA.

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