The Periphrastic Passive Grammaticalization in Modern Standard Arabic
Description
Natural languages go through two major cycles in their diachronic change. A high synthetic marking characterizes the first cycle, and a high analytic marking characterizes
the second. This thesis investigates an emerging analytic passive in Modern Standard
Arabic (MSA), representing the analytic cycle. This construction is designated
periphrastic passive since two grammatical morphemes mark the passiveness. The older
morphological passive construction in Classical Arabic (CA) and MSA, representing the
synthetic cycle, is juxtaposed with the periphrastic passive. Given the inconsistent
passive characterization in the literature, the comparison between the two passive forms
is couched in the prototypical passive analysis.
This thesis seeks to show that the periphrastic passive in MSA has
grammaticalized to perform the passive function. It argues that the main verb in the
periphrastic passive, i.e., tamma/yatimmu, has grammaticalized to a passive auxiliary.
The corpus data of CA and MSA about tamma/yatimmu complementation, the subjectverb agreement, and the frequency of tamma/yatimmu show the grammaticalization of the
periphrastic passive. The lexical source of the auxiliary tamma/yatimmu, i.e., ‘finish,’ is
also attested to perform the passive function in Colloquial Icelandic (CI). The
commonality between the lexical sources in the two passive constructions in MSA and CI
suggests that the lexical source ‘finish’ could serve as a lexical source of passive
constructions.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2022
Agent
- Author (aut): Alasmari, Abdullah Abdulrahman
- Thesis advisor (ths): Van Gelderen, Elly
- Committee member: Pruitt, Kathryn
- Committee member: Hussein, Lutfi
- Publisher (pbl): Arizona State University