The syntax of wh-questions in unaccusative and (Un)ergative structures in Mehri language: A Phase-based approach

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 18; no. 10; p. e0289779
• Main Authors: Fakih, Abdul-Hafeed, Al-Qumairi, Saeed Saad, Alzubi, Ali Abbas Falah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Francisco Public Library of Science 12.10.2023; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Arabic language; Biology and Life Sciences; Case marking; Chomsky, Noam; Dialects; Dictionaries; Endangered languages; Evaluation; Grammar; Grammar, Comparative and general; Grammatical subject; Language; Language awareness; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mehri language; Minimalist program; Morphology; Morphosyntax; Native languages; Phonology; Phrases; Questions; Semitic languages; Social Sciences; Syntactic movement; Syntactic phases; Syntax; Wh phrases; United Kingdom; Egypt; Yemen; Arabian Peninsula; Oman; Africa
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289779

The Mehri Language is an endangered language spoken in eastern Yemen, a sub-group of the Semitic language family, and a Southern Arabic language. The syntax of Mehri wh-questions has not been explored within minimalism; hence, there is a morpho-syntactic need to provide a modern analysis of wh-questions in order to show how the interrogative structures can be derived. This study aims to examine the syntax of the wh-question movement in Mehri’s unaccusative/ergative and unergative structures and answer the following questions within Chomsky’s (2000 and 2008) Phase-based Theory: (i) Does the Mehri language allow fronting of wh-phrases to [Spec-CP]? And (ii) how can wh-movement in Mehri unaccusative and (un)ergative structures be accounted for? This work presents a novel analysis of wh-question movement in unaccusative/ergative and unergative structures in Mehri; it demonstrates that the source head C triggers the movement of wh-adjunct and wh-subject phrases. In wh-adjunct extraction, two strategies are employed: overt wh-fronting and wh-in-situ; when the head Foc inherits an edge feature from C, wh-adjunct overtly undergoes movement from its original position within v*P to the left peripheries of [Spec-FocP] and subsequently to [Spec-CP]. When the lexical wh-adjunct remains within v*P, its question features covertly move to [Spec-CP], because the head Foc does not inherit an edge feature from C. In wh-subject extraction, the wh-subject overly undergoes movement to [Spec-CP] because C obligatorily inherits the edge feature to the head Top, which triggers movement of the illogical subject in unaccusative/ergative structures and the logical external specifier in unergative structures to [Spec-CP]. Moreover, Mehri obeys the Phase Impenetrability Condition of Chomsky, where wh-subject and wh-adjunct phrases must pass through certain phases until [Spec-CP].