The Adjectival Construct in Arabic

We propose an analysis of the adjectival construct in Arabic in LFG, building on previous work in LFG on a Welsh construction which shows several similarities to the Arabic (Mittendorf and Sadler, 2008) and work on the MSA and cognate Hebrew constructions by Hazout (2000); Kremers (2005); Siloni (2002); Heller (2002); Kim (2002). The construction involves an adjective occurring with an immediately following definite nominal, which denotes a property, part or quality of the noun that the adjectivemodifies (in attributive use) or is predicated of (in predicative constructions). The major characteristics of this construction are that the post-adjectival nominal serves to delimit the respect in which the adjective denotes a property of the external nominal, and the adjectival head and the GEN complement are subject to a very strict adjacency requirement. We present a syntactic analysis, showing that the construction is formed in the syntax rather than the morphology, and sketch out a proposal as to how the semantics of the construction might be captured.