Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2025 / The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

Summary

The paper offers a generative-syntax account of a frequent construction in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic (YIA), a dialect with little prior description. The construction is built on qulk ("I said"), a single fused form made of the verb qul "say" and the clitic -k marking a first-person subject. Qulk can introduce embedded declaratives, questions and commands, usually with no overt complementizer.

The authors argue that these sentences are really two clauses. On their view, qulk is a clause-embedding predicate whose complement is a complete CP. The evidence they cite comes from clause structure, agreement, negation and word order.

Using the standard Minimalist toolkit (Merge, Move, Agree, Spell-out), they walk through derivations for each clause type. A post-syntactic step, Morphological Merger, then explains how clitics and verb forms surface. The analysis also covers bipartite negation, cliticization and null subjects.

The main conclusion is that spoken dialectal Arabic is as rule-governed as Standard Arabic and fits Minimalist assumptions. The work is purely theoretical and introduces no corpus, treebank or quantitative evaluation.

Key points

  • qulk = verb qul "say" + subject clitic -k "I", realized as one morphological unit.
  • qulk introduces three embedded clause types: declarative, interrogative and imperative. All three typically appear without an overt complementizer but keep full sentential structure.
  • Core claim: the construction is biclausal, with qulk selecting a whole CP complement rather than acting as a mere lexical verb or particle.
  • The derivations use Merge, Move, Agree and Spell-out, plus Morphological Merger after syntax. For embedded commands, they draw on an Imperative Phrase (ImpP) projection proposed in earlier Minimalist work.
  • Open questions the authors raise:
    • whether the addressee counterpart qil-k "you said" behaves the same way;
    • how and at what age children acquire qulk-clauses.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A fused "say + subject" form is treated as a real predicate taking a full clause, not as a discourse marker, even with no complementizer present. — For Mova (tree): English reported-speech openers like "I said" or "I'm like" followed by a bare clause could be attached as a verb with a clausal complement (ccomp) rather than as loose parataxis.
  • I2. In the biclausal analysis, the embedded clause keeps its own clause type, so a command or question stays a command or question inside the report. — For Mova (frames): speech-act detection should assign force to the embedded clause and attribute that act to the reporting speaker, not to the narrator.
  • I3. Syntax builds separate pieces, and a later morphological step fuses them into one surface word. — For Mova (tokens): splitting fused forms like "I'll" or "gonna" into syntactic words before parsing, while remembering the surface form, keeps the tree clean and generation faithful.
  • I4. Bipartite negation (ma…-š) is handled as one negative meaning carried by two separate exponents. — For Mova (frames): split English negation patterns could be collapsed into a single polarity feature on the frame, so negation is never counted twice or lost.
  • I5. The speaker-oriented form is contrasted with its addressee counterpart as a natural test of whether the analysis generalizes. — For Mova (learn): build minimal pairs that differ only in the person of the reporting verb and check that frames assign the source of speech correctly, as a negative control.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376 · arXiv 2512.22376

@misc{albadani2025syntax,
  title = {{The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic: A Minimalist Approach}},
  author = {Albadani, Zubaida Mohammed and Shormani, Mohammed Q.},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376},
  eprint = {2512.22376},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376}
}

References

38 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Shormani, M. Q. (2019). Vocatives in Yemeni (Ibbi) Arabic: Functions, Types and Approach. Journal of Semitic Studies, 64(1), 221–250. find
  2. Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2010). Imperatives and commands. Oxford University Press. find
  3. Alharbi, B. (2017). The syntax of copular clauses in Arabic [Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee]. find
  4. Al-Samki, A. A. A., & Al-Ghrafy, A. (2023). Revisiting the Syntax of English Imperative from a Minimalist Perspective. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature & Translation, 6(1) find
  5. Al-Shami, S. A. A., & Dkhissi, Y. (2021). A minimalist-based approach of tense and subject features in Standard Arabic and Yemeni Arabic. Arts for Linguistic and Literary Studies, 2021(10), 7–341. find
  6. Berwick, R. C., & Chomsky, N. (2016). Why only us? Language and evolution. MIT Press. find
  7. Carnie, A. (2021). Syntax: A generative introduction (4 th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. find
  8. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague Mouton. find
  9. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
  10. Chomsky, N. (2000). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In R. Martin, D. Michaels & J. Uriagereka (eds.), Step by step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, Cambridge: MIT Press. 89–155. find
  11. Chomsky, N. (2001). Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1-52. find
  12. Chomsky, N. (2021). Minimalism: Where are we now, and where can we hope to go. Gengo Kenkyu (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan), 160, 1-41. find
  13. Crnič, L., & Trinh, T. (2009). Embedding imperatives in English. In A. Riester & T. Solstad (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 13 (pp. [insert page numbers]). University of Stuttgart. find
  14. Fakih, A. H. (2003). Case, agreement and wh-movement in verbless constructions in Standard Arabic: A minimalist perspective. ResearchGate. find
  15. Ghulfan, M. (2010). *Generative linguistics: From the pre-standard model to the Minimalist Program: Concepts and examples*. Irbid: Modern Book World for Publishing and Distribution. find
  16. Guella, N. (2010). On relative clause formation in Arabic dialects of the Maghreb. Synergies: Monde Arabe, 7, 101–110. find
  17. Haegeman, L. (2006). Thinking syntactically: A guide to argumentation and analysis. Blackwell Publishing. find
  18. Hankamer, J., & Mikkelsen, L. (2012, November 6). CP complements to D. University of California, Santa Cruz & University of California, Berkeley. find
  19. Jackendoff, R. (1977). X-bar syntax: A study of phrase structure. MIT Press. find
  20. Kac, M. B. (1972). Clauses of saying and the interpretation of because. Language, 48(3), 626–632. https://doi.org/10.2307/412038 ↗
  21. Matushansky, O. (2006). Head movement in linguistic theory. Linguistic inquiry, 37(1), 69-109. find
  22. Ouhalla, J. (1999). Introducing transformational grammar: From rules to principles and parameters. (No Title). find
  23. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Harper Perennial. find
  24. Pryor, J. (2007). Reasons and that‐clauses. Philosophical Issues, 17(1), 217-244. find
  25. Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegeman (Ed.), Elements of grammar: A handbook of generative syntax (pp. 281– 337). Dordrecht: Springer. find
  26. Robins, R. H. (2013). A short history of linguistics. Routledge. find
  27. Rohdenburg, G. (2019). Rivalling noun-dependent complements in modern English: That-clauses and ‘complex’ gerunds. Anglia, 137(2), 217–254. find
  28. Shormani, M. (2013). An Introduction to English syntax: A generative approach. Lambert Academic Publishing. find
  29. Shormani, M. Q. (2014). Clitic construct state in Semitic: A minimalist N-to-Spec approach. AlQalam Journal, 2(1), 1–47. find
  30. Shormani, M. Q. (2019). Vocatives in Yemeni (Ibbi) Arabic: Functions, types and approach. Journal of Semitic Studies, 64(1), 221–250. find
  31. Shormani, M. Q. (2021). Imperatives in Arabic: Syntax, discourse and interface. International Journal of Arabic Linguistics, 7(1), 70–91. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4561492 ↗
  32. Shormani, M. Q. (2024a). Introducing Minimalism: A Parametric Variation. Lincom Europa Press. find
  33. Shormani, M. Q. (2024b). Generative linguistics contribution to artificial intelligence: Where this contribution lies?. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20221. ↗
  34. Shormani, M. Q. & Mohammed A. Q. (2018). Vocatives: correlating the syntax and discourse at the interface. Cogent Arts & Humanities 5, 1: 1469388. find
  35. Shormani, M. Q., & Alhussen, A. M. (2024). The syntax of negative imperatives in Yemeni Arabic: A phase approach. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 24(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.10361 ↗
  36. Storms, G. (1966). That-clauses in modern English. English Studies, 47(1– 6), 249–270. find
  37. Tallerman, M. (2011). Understanding syntax (3 rd ed.). Hodder Education. find
  38. Zwart, J.-W. (1998). [Review of the book The minimalist program, by N. Chomsky]. Journal of Linguistics, 34(1), 213–226. find

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/albadani-2025-syntax-qulk-clauses-yemeni-ibbi/