A split morphosyntactic analysis of diminutives in two Arabic varieties

Contra the literature on Arabic prosodic morphology where templatic diminutive morphemes are often regarded as inflectional, this research paper argues for a distinction between their inflectional and derivational function in two Arabic varieties, i.e. Standard Arabic (SA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), by offering a split analysis for these morphemes. It is demonstrated that the diminutive template C1u.C2ajC3 in SA and C1aC2.C2uuC3 in JA may enter the derivation under different heads. Under Size0, these templatic morphemes exhibit inflectional properties. In contrast, under n0, they yield idiosyncrasies. Cross-linguistically, the split analysis of the diminutive adds credence to the relatively recent literature that suggests that the diminutive is not morphosyntactically unique and can be located in different syntactic positions to serve different functions. Furthermore, either function indicates that SA and JA are grouped with languages that strictly categorize the diminutive as a syntactic head.