Word Order and the Clause Structure in Jordanian Arabic: A Minimalist-Cartographic Approach

Besides the basic SVO word permutation in Jordanian Arabic (JA), other marked word orders exist: VSO and VOS. This paper examines the derivation of these different word permutations in terms of the nature, distributional properties, and position(s) the subject surfaces in. Two theoretical frameworks are advocated for this end: Chomsky’s minimalist framework and Rizzi’s rich discourse layer of the left zone of clause. Although it was established that the discourse-free and/or unmarked word permutation in the language is SVO, the subject of SVO clauses is ambiguous between two interpretations: (i) a neutral subject located in Spec-TP or (ii) a topic externally merged in Spec-TopP. These two interpretations are subject to definiteness and/or specificity condition. This indicates that even if SVO is the unmarked word permutation in a given language, it is liable to interpretative variation. As for VSO and VOS, we argue that these marked word orders are derived from the marked topical version of SVO in the sense that the postverbal subject in VSO and VOS is a left-peripheral topic. The head verb in VSO is further moved to the head Foc, and the whole VP in VOS is moved to Spec-FocP for focus considerations. Our analysis adds credence to the proposal that information structure does manifest in syntactic derivation.