Subject-Verb Agreement in Arabic from a Sign-Based Construction Grammar Perspective: A Sentence Types View

Abstract

Arabic sentences exhibit both SVO and VSO word orders, and these word orders show different agreement patterns between the subject and the verb. This agreement asymmetry has been the subject of research for a long time. This paper adds to the body of literature regarding this topic by presenting a Sign-Based Construction Grammar account of the phenomenon. It differs from previous research in that it accounts for all sentence types in Arabic and not the ones that include a verb. To achieve this goal, a sentence type view is adopted instead of a word order view. This paper shows that adopting a sentence type view instead of a word order view allows for a better understanding of Arabic sentences and paves the way to accounts of other languages exhibiting the same phenomenon