Arabic phrase structure

Arabic syntactic study can be undertaken from several perspectives, as noted in the previous chapter. Phrases and clauses are the two key sites of syntactic analysis; phrases are organized groups of words that fill particular functions within sentences, but which also have a certain integrity and rule-structure of their own. Phrases have no predication (for example, haadhihi l-şuurat-u ‘this picture’ or al-bayt-u l-ʔabyađ-u ‘the white house’). Clauses (or sentences) involve a predication of some kind (for example, haadhihi hiya l-şuurat-u ‘This is the picture,’ or al-bayt-u ʔabyađ-u ‘The house is white’). This chapter focuses on Arabic phrase structure; the following chapter will focus on clause structure.

As noted earlier in the discussion of Arabic morphosyntax, the dominant principles of Arabic syntactic structure are agreement and government. These prevail in both phrase structure and clause structure, but in different ways. In this chapter I will first discuss agreement-based phrase structure and then government-based phrase structure.