The syntax of non-canonical coordination in Jordanian Arabic: An experimental investigation

Abstract

Non-canonical coordination occurs when non-constituents are conjoined. Two major types of non-canonical coordination are gapping and non-constituent coordination (NCC). Non-canonical coordination has received interest for its relevance to core issues in syntax, such as constituency and phrase structure. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it provides empirical evidence for non-canonical coordination from Jordanian Arabic (JA) via an experimental investigation. Two acceptability judgment tasks (rating on a Likert scale) were designed to investigate the status of gapping and NCC in JA. A generalized linear model (GLM) was fit to the data, using the (glm) function from the mlogit package in R. There was a main effect of gapping (χ 2 = 13.203, p < 0.001) and NCC (χ 2 = 15.371, p < 0.001) on the acceptability of the constructions in the positive direction. Second, the article provides an analysis of the facts that is couched in terms of left-to-right syntax via a hybrid analysis that assumes that non-canonical coordination can have two sources: a complementizer phrase source and a vP source.

Keywords

• jordanian arabic
• non-constituent coordination
• gapping
• atb movement
• ellipsis