Prenominal and postnominal adjectives in Arabic: A proposed analysis

Abstract

This article discusses the status of prenominal and postnominal adjectives in Arabic. It is argued that Kremers’s treatment of adjectives is non-economic as it generates two different syntactic representations for prenominal and postnominal adjectives. It also undermines endocentric properties of phrasal projections and fails to correctly predict the definiteness status of adjectival construct state heads. The article proposes an alternative analysis with a single underlying syntactic structure for both types of adjectives. The need to have nominal features of the specifier (Spec) of the agreement phrase head (Agr) checked and licensed within the determiner phrase (DP) triggers leftward noun phrase (NP) movement, thus forming postnominal adjectives. In prenominal adjectives, however, the strong Definiteness Feature (DEF) on the determiner (D) causes the adjective phrase to raise to the specifier of the DP.