The Arabic Language

laysa 
(
laysa ṭawīlan 
‘he isn’t tall’). Tensed negations are relatively rare in the world’s 
languages. In the 
WALS 
(pp. 454–5) only a few instances of such negations are 
mentioned. The presence of tensed negations in Arabic has significant implica-
tions for the analysis of syntactic structure, which needs to have separate projec
-
tions for agreement and tense in order to account for the representation of tense 
in the negation rather than on the verb.
In the dialects most of the Classical Arabic negations have been replaced by a 
combination of the negative marker 
mā
with the noun 
šayʾ
‘thing’; together these 
act as a circumfix, as in (21) from Egyptian Arabic:
(21) 
ma-b-yiktib-š
 
NEG-CONT-write.IMPERF3ms-NEG
‘He doesn’t write’
In some dialects, the second part of the negation is left out, as in (22) from Syrian 
Arabic:
(22) 
mā- ʿam-yǝktob
 
NEG-CONT-write.IMPERF3ms
‘He doesn’t write’
Such two-part negations occur in some of the world’s languages, for instance, in 
the Romance languages, but they are rather infrequent (in the 
WALS 
sample for 
negation, covering more than a thousand languages, only sixty-six have a double 
negation, p. 455). The negative marker even replaces 
laysa 
in nominal negation, 
as in Egyptian Arabic 
ma-ni-š 
‘I am not’ and 
ma-hu-š
/
ma-hi-š 
‘he/she is not’ (from 
which the negation 
muš ~ miš 
is derived).
 
Under the term ‘pseudo-verbs’, Comrie (1982) has brought together a number 
of phenomena. In most Arabic dialects there is a category of words of non-verbal 
origin that, to some extent, behave as verbs, for instance, because they can have 
a direct object or because they are negated as verbs. Existentials are one class of 
such words, for example, Egyptian Arabic 
fi 
‘there is/are’, which is negated like a 
verb 
ma-fi-š 
‘there is/are not’. A second category is that of modal expressions like 
Syrian Arabic 
bǝdd 
‘to want’ (from Classical Arabic 
bi-wudd 
‘in the wish of …’). This 
pseudo-verb can take a subject and an object, as in (23):

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102
The Arabic Language
(23) 
bǝdd-o 
yā-kon
want-3ms 
OBJ-2p
‘He wants you [pl.]’ (Cowell 1964: 545)
A third category is constituted by expressions of possession. These are often 
indicated with a reflex of the Classical Arabic prepositions 
ʿinda
or 
li-
in combina
-
tion with pronominal suffixes; in Classical Arabic, too, these constructions were 
used to indicate possession, as in (24):
(24) 
la-hu 
kitāb-un
for-3ms 
book-NOM
‘He has a book’
In this construction, the possessed item is the subject of a nominal sentence. But 
in some dialects it has become a verb-like expression. Thus, in Maltese expres-
sions with g
ħand-
are used to express possession; they may have a subject and an 
object, and may be negated in the same way as verbs, as in (25):
(25) 
int 
m’-għand-ek-x 
ħafna 
paċenzja
 
2s 
NEG-POSS-2s-NEG much 
patience
‘You don’t have much patience’ (Peterson 2009: 188)
The exact syntactic analysis of the two nouns in (25) is still a matter of debate, and 
so is the nature of the word class to which these pseudo-verbs belong. According 
to Peterson (2009), who investigated the status of pseudo-verbs in Maltese, they 
constitute a word class of their own. At the very least, these three categories of 
pseudo-verbs are interesting because of the fact that they illustrate a cross-over 
from the word class of nouns to that of the verbs. 
The morphology and syntax of Arabic numerals have baffled even the Arabic 
grammarians. Surprisingly, however, one of the most striking traits of numerals is 
passed by them almost in silence, the so-called polarity of the numerals between 
three and ten, as in 
ṯalāṯatu rijālin
‘three men’ as against 
ṯalāṯu fatayātin 
‘three 
girls’, where the feminine form of the numeral is used with masculine nouns, 
and the masculine form with feminine nouns. According to the grammarians, 
the long form of the numeral (
ṯalāṯa
, 
ʾarbaʿa
,
 
etc.) is the original form, but with 
feminine nouns the 
tāʾ marbūṭa 
is deleted in order to avoid heaviness. The polarity 
agreement exists in other Semitic languages as well, and most attempts at expla
-
nation look at this phenomenon from the perspective of comparative Semitic 
linguistics. The most current explanation connects this phenomenon with the 
expression of collectivity in Arabic, which uses the feminine ending 
-at 
for the 
noun of unity: 
dajjāj-un 
‘poultry’ as against 
dajjāj-at-un 
‘a chicken’. This means that 
the feminine ending could be regarded as a marker of countability, or, according 
to some scholars, originally even as a plural marker. In the cardinal numerals 

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The Structure of Arabic 
103
the original form would then be the long form, with the 
-at 
ending as marker 
of the plural. When connected with a feminine noun with the ending 
-at
,
 
the 
marking in the numeral becomes redundant, hence the polarity agreement. One 
could even hypothesise that the feminine agreement of adjectives and verbs with 
broken plurals belongs to the same sphere: if the broken plural is a collective (see 
above, p. 93), the 
-at 
ending in the adjective and the verb agreeing with them 
would then denote plurality. In most modern dialects, the polarity system has 
disappeared. In the numerals between 2 and 10, the short form is used with all 
plurals. Plurals beginning with a vowel receive an additional 
t-
, for example, 
arbaʿ 
t-iyām
‘four days’ (Damascus Arabic). In numerals between 12 and 19 only the 
long form is used, for example, 
arbaṭaʿšar
(Damascus Arabic); in most dialects this 
-t-
has become emphatic, one of the fourteen features that Ferguson assigns to 
the Arabic koine (see p. 138).