A Prosodic Account of Arabic Construct State: Evidence from Active Participles

There are well-known approaches to the analysis of Construct State (CS) such as N-to-D movement, remnant movement and N-to-Spec movement. Although these approaches have accounted for the properties of CSs, they have been criticized by a considerable number of linguists for several problematic issues. This paper attempts to find out a prosodic account of the construct state in Arabic. It brings about new evidence for a prosodic account from Active Participles which assign accusative case when they appear with the absolute indefinite markers -un, -an, -in. In such a case, they take a subject and an object, assign a case to them, and refer to the present or future (i.e., complex event nominal). However, in a construct state, Active Participles are inflected with a non-absolute indefinite marker -u, -a, -i, and assign genitive case to N2. The paper briefly reviews some of the Active Participle accounts, revisits the evidence of the prosodic nature of the construct state, goes through the previous prosodic accounts, and investigates the Active participle to support the prosodic account of the construct state. The paper argues that in such cases Active Participle nominals denote the person rather than the event and thus lack argument structure. It also contends that construct Active Participles have prosodic case checking which accounts for their genitive, rather than accusative, case. Thus, the paper contributes to Arabic studies by refining and challenging previous syntactic-based analyses of CSs.